Close those laptops! Anthropic puts its agent Claude Cowork on your phone

Squeezing half a broken laptop to preserve it Artificial intelligence agents The run is coming to an end. Anthropic announced Tuesday that Claude Cowork, its AI agent designed to perform digital tasks for you, is expanding beyond the desktop app.

You don’t need to leave your device turned on, aka Laptop It is opened, to keep the agent running and scheduled tasks running throughout the night. Anthropic also announced limited versions of Cowork for users to interact with via the Claude smartphone app or web browser, without the previously required desktop connection.

In the video launching this feature, Anthropic It shows a person asking for help in renewing a business deal scheduled for the next day. In one prompt, the user asks Cowork to collect data from email chains, Slack channels, meeting transcripts, and recent online conversations. The user then asks Cowork to use that information to create a meeting reference document and a pre-written email. Previously, Cowork could do all of this while your desktop session was active, at least. Now, the agent can work even after work, capturing those late-night incoming messages.

I tried first Claude Cowork When it dropped in January, I was immediately amazed that this agent could actually follow through and complete the tasks I asked it to run on my laptop, like organizing a bunch of screenshot files into respectable, labeled folders. It also did a solid job of helping me schedule events in my calendar. the factor It wasn’t perfect, and it still put me at risk Rapid injections Or other security breaches, however, Cowork seemed like a major change in how ordinary users interact with their devices.

This isn’t the first time Claude users have been able to interact with Anthropic agents on their mobile devices. Previously, users could pair their smartphone app with their desktop through the “Dispatch” feature. This enabled users to send task requests from their phones, regardless of where they are. But this approach had one major limitation. “Your computer must be active, and the application must be open so Claude can work on tasks,” the message read. Anthropic description. This is why some users leave their laptops open to continue running sessions. Now, Cowork can run tasks without an active desktop session.

The announcement is part of a larger, recent shift in Silicon Valley toward always-on, semi-autonomous AI agents that you can control via text messages. This has sparked a trend OpenClawa homebrew brewer with a lobster mascot that went viral at the start of 2026, as early adopters turned it on 24/7 and handed control of their lives online.

Other tech companies have been jealous of all this crustacean-focused praise. So, in the first half of the year, OpenAI hired the creator of OpenClaw and launched Codex Alimentariusits adaptive agent; Google launched Spark, take on permanent agent; Anthropic has moved more toward making its customers more user-friendly. The Anthropic Breakthrough Strike was Claude CodeWhich helped developers automate tasks. Cowork takes a similar approach, translating it outside the context of a computer terminal, and putting this power into a chatbot model for everyday users.

Anthropic plans to offer this revised version of Cowork as a trial to subscribers to the Max plan, which starts at $100 per month. After that, the features are expected to trickle down to members of Anthropic’s cheapest tier, Pro, which costs $20 per month. It’s unclear if this will be rolled out to free users, who don’t currently have access to Claude Cowork in their subscriber tier.