Quick answer: Anthropic has expanded Claude Cowork – its agentic “AI coworker” feature – beyond the desktop app to web and mobile. You can now kick off a task on your laptop, check its progress on your phone, and keep the work running even after you close the lid. It’s currently in beta for Pro and Max subscribers.
What Changed
Until this update, Cowork lived entirely on your desktop. Close the laptop, and whatever Claude was doing stopped with it. That’s no longer the case.
With the expansion, three things are different:
- Your work follows you: Start a task at your desk, check on it from your phone, and pick up the finished output from wherever you are.
- Work keeps running in the background: Shut the laptop and head into a meeting – Claude keeps going. Scheduled tasks can even run with no device online at all.
- You’re still the one making the calls: When Claude hits a decision only you can make, it pauses and sends the question to your phone. Nothing ships until you’ve reviewed it.
Anthropic frames it simply: start at your desk, pick it up on your phone, close your laptop, and it keeps going anyway.
How to Actually Use It
On web, desktop, and mobile, chat and Cowork now live in the same place. Open the message box, tap “Cowork” instead of “Chat,” and describe what you need done. Switching back to a normal conversation is just tapping “Chat” again.
On the Chrome side panel, it works slightly differently – opening the panel drops you straight into a Cowork session, no toggle needed.
A practical example: you could start a task in the Chrome side panel while looking at a dashboard, then switch to desktop later to work with the files it downloaded. Whenever Claude finishes or needs input, you get a phone notification.
Desktop Still Has the Edge
Don’t expect full parity between platforms just yet. Desktop remains the “full” Cowork experience – it’s the only place Claude can use your local files and browser directly. Web and mobile are genuinely useful for starting tasks, monitoring progress, and steering things mid-run, but deep local-file work still belongs to the desktop app.
There’s a related feature worth knowing too: Dispatch. It creates a persistent thread between the Claude mobile app and the Claude Desktop app – think of it as a walkie-talkie into your Cowork session. You text a task from your phone, and your desktop app (which needs to be awake and open) carries it out using your local files, connectors, and plugins, then hands you the finished result.
Who Gets It, and What You Need
- Available in beta for Pro and Max plans.
- Requires the Claude Desktop app and the Claude mobile app (iOS or Android), both updated to their latest versions.
- Your computer needs to be awake with the desktop app open for local-file tasks to run.
- An active internet connection on both devices.
Because Cowork uses a single persistent thread rather than resetting for every task, Claude also retains context between sessions – message it from your phone on the way to work, then pick the thread back up from your desktop once you’re at your desk.
Why This Matters
This is Anthropic pushing Cowork further from “coding tool” territory and closer to a general-purpose agentic assistant that tags along across every device you own – closer to something like a digital coworker than a chatbot you have to babysit at your desk. It also puts Claude more directly in competition with agent features rolling out from Google and others aiming at the same “AI that works while you’re away” pitch.
For now, treat it as a beta: solid for starting and steering tasks from anywhere, but if you’re doing heavy local-file work, keep the desktop app in the loop.
