Claude Cowork scheduled tasks need the app open, unlike ChatGPT and Gemini

This piece sits inside a longer editorial series in which the same team has compared what ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude actually promise in their official help pages — covering topics like upload limits, how to delete memory, email-sending permissions and how conversations become documents. The stated rule for that series is to compare primary-source documentation rather than log into real accounts, so this article is a reading of published specs, not a hands-on test.

The three scheduled-execution features all arrived around 2025 and are aimed at automating routine office work such as standing reports and reminders. The three execution behaviors are laid side by side, and the question is asked why one of them depends on a running desktop app. Its answer is a layered-implementation hypothesis: server-side job queues for ChatGPT and Gemini, and a process tied to the desktop application for Cowork, which handles file and browser operations close to the user's local environment. The author is explicit that this is reverse-engineered from described behavior and that other explanations, such as cloud resource limits or staged rollouts, cannot be ruled out.

Two caveats frame the comparison. Gemini's eligible plans and available regions were described inconsistently across the sources checked, so no definitive answer is given there. And the interface wording, plan eligibility and execution conditions are all subject to change in future updates, meaning readers should confirm current terms on the official help pages.