Anthropic has released Claude Dispatch, a feature within its Cowork environment that allows users to assign tasks to Claude from a smartphone while the AI executes them on a desktop computer. Announced on March 18, 2026, by Felix Rieseberg, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, the feature is available as a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers.
The system maintains a single persistent conversation thread across devices rather than starting new sessions for each task. A user can message Claude from their phone during a commute, and Claude executes the work on their desktop machine using local files, connectors, and plugins already configured in Cowork. Claude returns the completed output — a spreadsheet, memo, or comparison table — rather than showing intermediate steps.
All processing occurs locally on the user’s desktop within a sandboxed environment. The desktop machine must be awake and the Claude Desktop app must be running for tasks to execute. This local-first approach means sensitive data never leaves the user’s machine for processing, which addresses a persistent concern for enterprise adoption of AI assistants. The phone acts purely as a remote control interface.
Setup requires the latest versions of both the Claude Desktop app (macOS or Windows x64) and the Claude mobile app (iOS or Android), plus an active internet connection on both devices. The configuration process takes approximately two minutes and includes options for file access permissions and keeping the computer awake during task execution.
Claude Dispatch represents Anthropic’s push toward asynchronous AI workflows. Rather than requiring active monitoring of AI output, users can delegate tasks and return to finished work later. Example use cases listed in the documentation include pulling data from local spreadsheets, searching Slack messages and email to draft briefing documents, building presentations from Google Drive files, and organizing files in specific folders.
The feature positions Claude as a persistent background worker rather than a conversational interface. Competing products from OpenAI and Google have not yet shipped equivalent cross-device task delegation with local processing. Anthropic plans to expand availability beyond the current research preview, though no specific timeline has been announced.
