Anthropic Cowork shifts to cloud-based model inference and VMs

Anthropic engineer Felix Rieseberg explains the differences between the old and new architectures of Cowork: The old version performed inference in the cloud and ran a local VM on the user's computer, resulting in high disk, battery, and performance overhead, stopping work when the laptop lid was closed. The new version moves both model inference and the VM to the cloud, with each session having an independent sandbox. The desktop app only handles tool calls requiring local device access, such as file access. Officials believe this solves issues related to mobile phone usage, keeping work running, and battery consumption.