Anthropic is expanding Claude Cowork, its AI task-execution product, beyond the desktop app for the first time. The rollout begins with Max subscribers and will reach users on other paid plans in the coming weeks, according to The Verge and Anthropic's own blog post.

Cowork had been confined to the Claude desktop app for macOS and Windows since launch, with a Linux beta also available through the desktop client. The new iOS and Android apps extend reach to phones, and a web client removes the desktop-install requirement entirely.

But the more significant shift is architectural. Cowork sessions now run in the cloud by default, rather than on the user's local machine. That change is what enables cross-device continuity: a task started on a laptop can be picked up on a phone, and Cowork can keep running in the background even after the laptop lid closes. Scheduled tasks now execute even when none of a user's devices are online, since execution has moved off the endpoint and into Anthropic's infrastructure.

Desktop users retain the option to toggle between cloud and local processing. However, the full experience—including local file access—stays tied to the desktop app. That distinction matters for anyone running Cowork against sensitive local filesystems or workflows that need to stay air-gapped (isolated from the internet): cloud-default execution trades convenience for the kind of local-data control that desktop-only deployment previously guaranteed by design.

On mobile, Claude can now push alerts to a user's phone when a Cowork task is ready for review or approval. This turns the mobile app into an approval gate for asynchronous agent runs rather than a full authoring surface. That's consistent with Anthropic's own framing that mobile and web are companion surfaces to desktop, not full replacements.

Anthropics also extended the doubled Cowork usage limits it had introduced previously, pushing that promotional ceiling through August 5th. The extension suggests either strong adoption that Anthropic wants to keep accelerating, or usage patterns still below what full-price limits would need to sustain—Anthropic has not disclosed which.

Some usage data has surfaced alongside the announcement. ZDNet reports that Anthropic sampled 1.2 million anonymized Cowork sessions between May 11 and May 31, 2026, spanning more than 600,000 users—the first indication of Cowork's scale since its desktop launch. Anthropic has not published the sampled findings' substantive conclusions, only the sampling methodology and window.

This pattern is familiar in the evolution of agent-execution products: tools that start local migrate to cloud-first once vendors need cross-device state and background execution. Google's Gemini and OpenAI's operator-adjacent agent products have followed similar trajectories, moving orchestration off the client as soon as persistence and mobile parity become priorities. Anthropic's decision to keep a cloud and local toggle on desktop, rather than deprecating local execution outright, appears to be a deliberate hedge against enterprise customers who need local file access for compliance or data-residency reasons.

For teams building on Cowork, the practical question is less about interface parity and more about what changes when execution state lives on Anthropic's servers rather than a user's machine. Audit logging, retention windows, and whatever SOC 2 or equivalent controls apply to cloud-run sessions haven't been detailed in the sources here, and will matter more to Team and Enterprise customers than the arrival of a phone app.

The broader context here is toward agents that persist independent of any single device—an approach that, if reliability holds up, makes background-running AI tasks feel less like software you open and more like infrastructure you check in on. Whether Cowork's cloud-default model holds up under enterprise scrutiny, particularly around data residency, is worth watching as the rollout reaches Pro, Team, and Enterprise users in the coming weeks.