Can your AI helper work while you sleep?

Anthropic has expanded its tool called Claude Cowork to be accessible via web browsers and mobile phones. Previously, this tool only worked through a specific desktop program that had to stay open and running to complete any job. If you wanted the AI to finish a task, you had to keep your laptop screen awake all night. Now, Claude Cowork can run in the cloud. This means modern servers, rather than your personal computer, handle the heavy lifting. You can set a task, walk away, and the system completes it in the background even if your computer is completely shut down.

To understand why this is a change at all, it helps to think about how AI typically lives. A standard chatbot is like a library assistant who only talks to you while you are standing at the desk. When you walk away, the conversation stops. A task-performing agent, or Cowork, is more like a dedicated intern. When you give the intern a project—like gathering information from three different email chains and putting it into a briefing document—they don’t stop just because you left the room. They continue working because the software is now operating in the cloud, which is essentially a massive, shared computer that stays online 24/7. When the intern finishes, they send you a notification on your phone letting you know their work is ready for you to review, approve, or sign off on. This eliminates the need for you to act as a babysitter for your own computer.

We are seeing a shift where AI is moving away from being a tool just for tech experts and into the realm of everyday office work. The data released by Anthropic shows that the most popular uses for these tools are not writing computer code, but rather the administrative tasks that keep a business running: reconciling spreadsheets, building onboarding checklists, and summarizing meeting transcripts. These are the repetitive, unglamorous tasks that fill up a workday. By moving these agents into our pockets and browsers, the goal is to make AI a background presence that handles the busywork. The big question moving forward isn't whether AI can write a poem, but whether it can reliably take over the rote tasks that consume our calendars.