Anthropic rolls out Claude Computer Use research preview on Mac

Anthropic rolled out a computer-use research preview for the consumer Claude desktop app, letting Claude Pro and Max subscribers on macOS and Windows have the model point, click, type and navigate their own screen to complete tasks — opening files, driving a browser, or running development tools — when it lacked a purpose-built tool or connector for the job. Anthropic had shipped computer use as a developer-facing API capability in October 2024; this was the first time the capability reached ordinary subscribers inside the product itself rather than through code.

Access followed a permission-first model: Claude had to request approval before touching a new application, and users could interrupt it at any point. Anthropic described the feature as still early relative to the model’s coding or text abilities and cautioned that mistakes were possible. The rollout paired with Dispatch, a feature released the same week that let users hand Claude a task from a phone and have it carried out on their computer while they were away — for instance, assembling a morning briefing or making changes in an IDE — with computer use as the mechanism that made those unattended tasks possible.

The release was one entry in a dense run of Anthropic product launches that month, and it marked computer control moving from a capability demonstrated to developers toward one offered directly to a mainstream subscriber base.