Anthropic on Monday launched the most ambitious consumer AI agent to date, giving its Claude chatbot the ability to directly control a user’s Mac — clicking buttons, opening applications, typing into fields, and navigating software on the user’s behalf while they step away from their desk.The update, available immediately as a research preview for paying subscribers, transforms Claude from a conversational assistant into something closer to a remote digital operator. It arrives inside both Claude Cowork, the company’s agentic productivity tool, and Claude Code, its developer-focused command-line agent. Anthropic is also extending Dispatch — a feature introduced last week that lets users assign Claude tasks from a mobile phone — into Claude Code for the first time, creating an end-to-end pipeline where a user can issue instructions from anywhere and return to a finished deliverable.The move thrusts Anthropic into the center of the most heated competition in artificial intelligence: the scramble to build agents that can act, not just talk. OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, and a growing swarm of startups are all chasing the same prize — an AI that operates inside your existing tools rather than beside them. And the stakes are no longer theoretical. Reuters reported Sunday that OpenAI is actively courting private equity firms in what it described as an “enterprise turf war with Anthropic,” a battle in which the ability to ship working agents is fast becoming the decisive weapon.The new features are available to Claude Pro subscribers (starting at $17 per month) and Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month), but only on macOS for now.Inside Claude’s computer use: How Anthropic’s AI agent decides when to click, type, and navigate your MacThe computer use feature works through a layered priority system that reveals how Anthropic is thinking about reliability versus reach.When a user assigns Claude a task, it first checks whether a direct connector exists — integrations with services like Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, or Google Calendar. These connectors are the fastest and most reliable path to completing a task, according to Anthropic’s documentation. If no connector is available, Claude falls back to n …
