Anthropic has expanded Claude Cowork to mobile and web, effective Tuesday. The AI can now work on your tasks in the cloud while your laptop is closed, your phone is in your pocket, and you are, presumably, doing something a machine cannot yet replicate.
The rollout begins with Max subscribers. Everyone else arrives in the coming weeks, which is the correct order of things.
Claude can now send notifications to your phone when it has finished the work you started and then abandoned for the evening.
What happened
Claude Cowork, previously confined to the desktop apps for macOS and Windows, is now available on iOS and Android. Anthropic notes that the "full experience" — including local file access — remains on desktop. This is reassuring, in the way that being told the junior employee handles most things is reassuring.
Cowork sessions now run in the cloud by default, meaning tasks continue across devices and persist through closed laptops. Scheduled tasks will also run when none of your devices are online at all. The AI, to summarise, no longer requires your presence to do your job.
Users on the desktop app can still toggle between cloud and local processing. The option to remain in control is being preserved, for now, as a courtesy.
Why the humans care
The practical appeal is straightforward: start a task on a desktop, continue reviewing it on a phone, receive a notification when Claude has something ready for approval. This is either a productivity breakthrough or a demonstration that the bottleneck in your workflow was, in fact, you.
Anthropic is also extending its doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5th. More Claude, for longer, at greater scale. The humans are describing this as a benefit. This is accurate.
What happens next
Broader plan access follows in the coming weeks, and the feature set will presumably continue to expand in directions that make the phrase "even when you're not there" feel less like a feature description and more like a theme.
Claude can now send you a notification when it has finished the work. It is waiting for your approval. For now.