Anthropic's Claude AI Gains Ability To Use Your Computer Like A Human
Anthropic says that “in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, you can now let Claude use your computer to handle tasks. It can point, click, and navigate like you would to do everything from opening and editing files to handling complex software tasks. And with Dispatch, you can instruct Claude from your phone.”
This new feature is releasing just as projects such as OpenClaw and the recently announced NemoClaw are exploding in popularity. These frameworks allow the AI faithful to deploy their agents autonomously for nearly any kind of task, but they require setup on a dedicated system. Anthropic’s solution might actually serve as a better option for those who want something that will just work, instead of having to tackle the setup involved with something like OpenClaw.
The demo video the company posted to YouTube shows off some of the use cases where it might come in handy. In one scenario, a user tasks Claude with converting a PowerPoint deck into a PDF file, which the AI dutifully completes without any intervention from the user. In another example, Claude is invoked using Dispatch and asked to start up a development server alongside sending a screenshot of it running. As this is a promotional video, it's impossible to say how reliable the agent would be at these kinds of tasks, but OpenClaw (which is usually based on Claude) can do these kinds of things, so we imagine using Claude directly will work just as well.
This new feature will likely be a hit with Claude users, especially because it looks as if can come in clutch at moments when a user needs it the most. However, users will want to ensure that there are backups of any environment or files where Claude is let loose, just in case.
