Anthropic drops Cowork local-run option for Claude Pro and Max

Until now, switching on "This computer only" in Claude's settings pushed an Anthropic-built virtual machine onto the user's PC, and the agent executed its tool calls from inside that VM while model inference stayed in the cloud. The removal of that option means both halves of the job now run on Anthropic's side.

Anthropic's stated reasoning comes from developer Felix Rieseberg, who wrote that the local setting existed "for capability, safety, and security," but that running the VM locally loaded the machine and halted work whenever a laptop was shut. His post frames cloud execution as resolving both issues, and points to a new convenience: a task kicked off on a PC can be continued on a smartphone. According to Rieseberg, each session now gets its own sandbox, does not share state with other sessions, and is discarded when the session ends.

The trade-off is likely to be felt by people who chose the local option precisely because it kept the agent off the cloud, since Anthropic has not framed the change as optional. How that lands may hinge on whether per-session sandboxing and desktop-app access limited to explicitly added folders satisfy the same concerns that the local setting once addressed.