Shut Those Laptops! Anthropic Puts Its Claude Cowork Agent on Your Phone
TL;DR
Anthropic is bringing Claude Cowork to the web and to the Claude apps on iOS and Android for the first time. Until now, Cowork was tied to the macOS and Windows desktop app. Cowork sessions now run in the cloud by default. Tasks can continue when your laptop is closed or no device is online, with approval requests sent to your phone. The desktop app remains the full experience: local file access, connected folders, local connectors, Claude in Chrome, and Computer Use still depend on it.
Nauti's Take
The meaningful move is not the phone app itself, but removing the laptop as the runtime anchor. That pushes agents closer to real assistance: start a task at night, review the output in the morning, and step in only for approvals.
The launch demo is polished in the usual PR-heavy way. Still, the direction is clear: agents are becoming less like tools you open and more like work queues you supervise.
Briefingshow
Anthropic is moving agents from an open laptop into a cloud-based work queue. That makes Cowork more practical for research, documents, follow-ups, and scheduled tasks, but it also raises the bar for approvals, data boundaries, and cost control. Teams testing agents should decide which jobs can be started from a phone and which still need a local machine.
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