Agents on the desktop: Claude Cowork and its equivalents

AI vendors are shipping computer-use agents that work on a user's desktop or laptop rather than answering questions in a chat window, further expanding AI's commercial exposure. While these agents are recent developments, they've experienced rapid progress. These products share a general working model. The user describes the outcome they need, the agent writes a plan, reads files, calls tools and produces documents, spreadsheets and presentations over several minutes or hours. Most can split a task across subagents or run on a schedule, pausing to request user approval to proceed with the plan. Anthropic first released Claude Cowork as a research preview in January 2026 and made it commercially available in April. Microsoft unveiled Copilot Cowork in March and released it in June. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work in July.

First reported by TechTarget. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.