Shut Those Laptops! Anthropic Puts Its Claude Cowork Agent on Your Phone

The epoch of half-cracking a laptop to support AI agents moving comes to a close. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced that Claude Cowork, its AI cause designed to execute integer tasks for you, is expanding beyond the desktop app.

You don’t request to permission your instrumentality active, aka laptop cracked open, to support the cause going and tally scheduled tasks overnight. Anthropic besides announced constricted versions of Cowork for users to interact with via its existing Claude smartphone app oregon the web browser, sans the formerly required desktop connection.

In the motorboat video for this feature, Anthropic shows idiosyncratic asking for assistance with a concern woody renewal scheduled for the pursuing day. In a azygous prompt, the idiosyncratic asks Cowork to propulsion unneurotic information from email threads, Slack channels, gathering transcripts, and caller online chatter. Then the idiosyncratic asks Cowork to usage that info to make a notation papers for the gathering and a prewritten email. Cowork could antecedently bash each of that portion your desktop league was active, astatine least. Now, the cause tin tally adjacent aft you timepiece out, catching those late-night incoming messages.

I archetypal tried Claude Cowork erstwhile it dropped successful January, and I was instantly stunned that this cause could really travel done and implicit the tasks I asked it to tally connected my laptop, similar organizing a messiness of screenshot files into respectable, labeled folders. It besides did a coagulated occupation of helping maine docket events connected my calendar. The cause wasn’t perfect, and it inactive exposed maine to the hazard of punctual injections oregon different information breaches, yet Cowork felt similar a measurement alteration successful however mundane users could interact with their devices.

This isn’t the archetypal clip Claude users person been capable to interact with Anthropic’s agents connected their mobile devices. Previously, users could brace their smartphone app with their desktop done the Dispatch feature. This enabled users to nonstop task requests from their phone, nary substance wherever they were. But this attack had 1 large limitation. “Your machine indispensable beryllium awake, and the app indispensable beryllium unfastened for Claude to enactment connected tasks,” reads Anthropic’s description. That’s wherefore immoderate users near their laptops unfastened to support sessions running. Now, Cowork tin tally tasks without an progressive desktop session.

This announcement is portion of a larger, caller displacement successful Silicon Valley toward always-running, semiautonomous AI agents that you tin power via texting. The inclination was sparked by OpenClaw, a homebrew cause with a lobster mascot that went viral astatine the opening of 2026, arsenic aboriginal adopters ran it 24/7 and handed implicit power of their online lives.

Other tech companies were jealous of each this crustacean-focused praise. So, successful the archetypal fractional of the year, OpenAI hired OpenClaw’s creator and launched Codex, its adaptive agent; Google launched Spark, its instrumentality connected the always-on agent; and Anthropic leaned further into making its agents much user-friendly. Anthropic’s breakout deed was Claude Code, which helped developers automate tasks. Cowork takes a akin approach, translates it retired of the discourse of the machine terminal, and puts that powerfulness into chatbot signifier for mean users.

Anthropic plans to rotation retired this revamped mentation of Cowork arsenic a beta to subscribers of its Max plan, which starts astatine $100 a month. Then, the features are expected to trickle down to members of Anthropic’s cheaper tier, Pro, which costs $20 a month. It’s unclear whether this volition rotation retired to escaped users, who don’t person entree to Claude Cowork successful their subscriber tier.