Anthropic Defends Cowork Cloud Shift for Battery and Mobile Access

Anthropic moved Cowork's virtual machine processing to company servers to reduce local hardware strain, ending disk, battery, and performance costs and enabling smartphone use, though the transition surprised some users despite notifications to Pro and Max subscribers. The new architecture uses isolated sandboxes destroyed after each session, and desktop file access now requires explicit user authorization for specific tool calls, following criticism over cloud compute sufficiency for multimedia workloads.