Close Those Laptops! Anthropic Puts Its Claude Assistant On Your Phone

Half time to tear the laptop to save AI assistants the run comes to an end. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced that Claude Cowork, its AI assistant designed to handle digital tasks for you, is expanding beyond desktop software.

You don’t have to leave your device running, aka laptop broken, so that the assistant can go and run the scheduled tasks throughout the night. Anthropic also announced a limited version of Cowork for users to interact with via the Claude mobile app or web browser, without the connection previously required.

In the opening video for the episode, Anthropic shows someone asking for help with a business plan scheduled for the next day. In a single instant, a user asks Cowork to collect data from email threads, Slack threads, meeting notes, and recent online chats. The user then asks Cowork to use that information to create a meeting document with a pre-written email. Cowork has been able to do all this in the past while your computer part is working, at least. Now, the assistant can run even if you close it, and catch incoming messages late at night.

I tried it first Claude Cowork when it dropped in January, and I was immediately surprised that the assistant could follow through and complete the tasks I asked it to do on my laptop, such as organizing photo folders into respectable, labeled folders. It also did a solid job of helping me organize events on my calendar. The assistant it wasn’t perfect, and it still shows me the danger of quick injection or other security breaches, however Cowork felt like a change in the way users interact with their devices on a daily basis.

This is not the first time that Claude users have been able to communicate with Anthropic agents on their mobile devices. Previously, users could integrate their smartphone app with their desktop via Dispatch. This allows users to send requests from their phone, regardless of where they are. But this method had one major problem. “Your computer must be awake, and the program must be open for Claude to work,” it reads Anthropic explanation. This is why some users have left their laptops open to run partitions. Now, Cowork can work without a desktop component.

The announcement is part of the latest big shift in Silicon Valley for full-time, autonomous AI assistants that you can control via text messaging. The culture was introduced by OpenClawa home assistant with crabs that spread in early 2026, when the first adopters ran 24/7 and managed their lives online.

Some tech companies were jealous of all this praise for the crustacean. Therefore, in the first half of the year, OpenAI hired the developer OpenClaw and launched it Codexits instrument of change; Google was founded Spark, his take on a regular assistant; and Anthropic leaned heavily on making its agents easy to use. Anthropic success was Claude Codewhich helped builders create jobs. Cowork takes a similar approach, translates from the computer, and puts that power into the form of a chatbot for ordinary users.

Anthropic plans to release this updated version of Cowork as a beta to subscribers of its Max plan, which starts at $100 per month. Next, the feature is expected to trickle down to members of Anthropic’s cheapest tier, Pro, which costs $20 a month. It is not known whether this will be offered to free users, who do not have access to Claude Cowork in their subscription section.