Anthropic’s Claude can now control your Mac, escalating the fight to build AI agents that actually do work

Anthropic on Monday launched the most ambitious consumer AI agent to date, giving its Claude chatbot the ability to directly control a user's Mac — clicking buttons, opening applications, typing into fields, and navigating software on the user's behalf while they step away from their desk.The update, available immediately as a research preview for paying subscribers, transforms Claude from a conversational assistant into something closer to a remote digital operator. It arrives inside both Claude Cowork, the company's agentic productivity tool, and Claude Code, its developer-focused command-line agent. Anthropic is also extending Dispatch — a feature introduced last week that lets users assign Claude tasks from a mobile phone — into Claude Code for the first time, creating an end-to-end pipeline where a user can issue instructions from anywhere and return to a finished deliverable.The move thrusts Anthropic into the center of the most heated competition in artificial int