Quoting Felix Rieseberg
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Cowork is moving its model work and sandbox from your laptop to Anthropic’s cloud. That should cut battery drain and keep sessions running even when the lid closes.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Anthropic is changing how Cowork works. The older setup ran model inference in the cloud, but it still shipped a VM to your computer for tool calls. That local VM was there for capability, safety, and security, with access limited to the data you explicitly added to a session.
People apparently liked what they could do with Claude, but not the cost of keeping that VM on a laptop. Disk use, battery drain, and performance hit all showed up in the feedback. And once the laptop closed, the work stopped too.
The new version moves both model inference and the VM into the cloud. Each session gets its own sandbox, and it does not share state with other sessions. When Cowork needs something from the user’s device, like a file, the desktop app handles that file access call instead.
Felix Rieseberg says that setup should remove several pain points at once: using Cowork from a phone, letting work keep going, and getting the same power without burning battery on the VM. It is a neat trade. Less local machinery, more uptime, and fewer excuses for the laptop fan to start sounding like a small airport.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Cloud-first agents always end up here: the flashy local setup lasts until battery life and friction show up in the same meeting. Pushing the VM out of the laptop is the sensible move, even if it makes the product feel a little less magical. The modern AI stack keeps rediscovering that convenience beats laptop cosplay.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog
