Anthropic moves Claude Cowork fully to the cloud, dropping the battery-hungry local VM
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-10-06
Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg details a major architecture change for Claude Cowork:
Old version: model inference ran in the cloud, but tool calls executed in an Anthropic-provisioned VM shipped to your computer (for capability, safety, and security — only data you explicitly added was mapped in). Users loved the capability but disliked the disk, battery, and performance cost, and closing the laptop stopped the work.
New version: both inference and the VM run in the cloud, each session gets its own sandbox with no shared state, and when the VM needs something from your device (like a file), the desktop app handles that file-access tool call.
This reportedly fixes key pain points: using Cowork from a phone, keeping work running, and no longer burning battery on a local VM.
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