Claude gains macOS 'Computer Use' controls
TestingCatalog revealed Claude’s new 'Computer Use' feature for macOS — enabling app control for Claude Cowork/Code and hinting at future 'Phone Use' support — a concrete step toward agentic apps controlling local environments. That tightens the line between assistants and app automation on desktops. (x.com)
Anthropic’s Computer Use tool exposes screenshot capture plus simulated mouse-and-keyboard actions that let Claude perform end-to-end UI workflows, and Anthropic’s docs cite strong single-agent results on the WebArena benchmark. (platform.claude.com) Cowork packages those capabilities into a desktop “task” experience that can be granted access to a specific folder for reading, editing, and creating files, and Anthropic advertises Cowork as a research preview for paid plans on Windows and macOS. (claude.com) Anthropic says developers can build with the Computer Use beta via the Anthropic API and that the capability is also available on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI alongside the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model announcement. (anthropic.com) The macOS rollout has been surfaced to paid Claude tiers—initial access for Pro and Max subscribers—and multiple product pages and coverage explicitly label Computer Use and Cowork as research previews with ongoing safety adjustments. (engadget.com) Open-source contributors and independent developers already maintain macOS-focused demos and forks that adapt Anthropic’s Computer Use scripts to run natively on Macs, with several GitHub repositories showing examples for automating UI actions and bash commands. (github.com) Remote-control flows are appearing in the wild: Claude Dispatch can forward phone-originated tasks to a Cowork session on a Mac via QR setup, and TestingCatalog spotted a separate “computer use” connector in Notion dev builds that would let other agent platforms operate desktops. (findskill.ai)
