Agent stacks compared — Anthropic to OpenClaw
A thread compared long‑horizon agent approaches — Anthropic’s Claude Cowork for deep reasoning, Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork for M365 integration, Perplexity Computer for research+search, and OpenClaw as an open‑source framework — laying out how providers are carving agent niches. The comparison highlights divergent bets: deep reasoning, platform integration, research focus, and open customizability. (x.com)
Anthropic released Claude Cowork as a research preview in March 2026 and advertises local, sandboxed desktop sessions for automated multi‑step tasks. (anthropic.com) Anthropic added a remote‑control feature called Dispatch that lets a phone control a sandboxed Cowork session and the feature was initially rolled out to Max subscribers as a research preview. (macstories.net) Microsoft formally announced Copilot Cowork on March 9, 2026, positioning it to execute actions across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and other M365 apps rather than only providing chat responses. (microsoft.com) Copilot Cowork is being offered in a phased Research Preview tied to Microsoft’s enterprise channels and E7 licensing, and Microsoft says broader access will come through its Frontier program; the product integrates Anthropic’s Claude technology in M365 environments. (venturebeat.com) Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer as an autonomous agent platform (Feb. 25, 2026) that delegates subtasks to a pool of specialist models and explicitly lists model routing such as Opus 4.6, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT 5.2. (thesys.dev) Perplexity Computer claims orchestration across roughly 19 models and connections to 400+ tools, and the company has pushed an enterprise edition with Slack integration and Snowflake connectors to compete with Microsoft and Salesforce. (thesys.dev) OpenClaw is an MIT‑licensed, developer‑facing, self‑hosted agent framework with an active GitHub organization (23 repositories) and Node.js runtime requirements documented in its official docs. (github.com) OpenClaw has seen ecosystem activity this month: Chinese cloud vendors including Baidu announced DuClaw builds around the OpenClaw model, Nvidia’s CEO publicly referenced OpenClaw as strategic, and OpenClaw contributors were targeted in a GitHub phishing campaign that impersonated project tokens. (msn.com)
