Anthropic Cowork moves inference and sandbox to the cloud

Anthropic's Cowork previously ran model inference in the cloud, while tool calls executed in a local virtual machine. According to Felix Rieseberg, the local VM was added for capability, safety and security reasons, and it mapped only data the user explicitly added to the session. But users were unhappy with the disk, battery and performance overhead of the local VM, and complained that closing the laptop would interrupt work. On 6 October 2026, Simon Willison reported that Cowork now runs model inference and the VM in the cloud.

Written by AI from the reports · updated 10 d ago