Anthropic moves Cowork session computers into the cloud

Anthropic has moved the virtual machine that executes Cowork's tool calls from users' computers into the cloud, Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg said. Model inference already ran in the cloud; the earlier design ran the virtual machine locally and stopped work when users closed their laptops. Each session now gets a separate cloud sandbox that does not share state with other sessions. When it needs a file on a user's device, the desktop app handles that access. Rieseberg said the change addresses complaints about local disk use, battery consumption and performance.