Anthropic Lets Claude Use Personal Computers to Complete Tasks

Anthropic says its Claude AI model can now use customers’ computers to carry out tasks.

“It opens your apps, navigates your browser, fills in spreadsheets—anything you’d do sitting at your desk,” the artificial intelligence (AI) startup said in a post on X (Monday).

The post included a video that showed a series of scenarios where this function would come in handy, like someone with dinner plans using Claude to process dozens of photos, or a person running late for a meeting asking the assistant to export a pitch deck as a PDF file and attach it to an invitation.

The new offering was flagged in a report Tuesday (March 24) by CNBC, which noted that this update spotlights efforts by AI companies to create agents that can carry out tasks for users around the clock.

Agentic capabilities have been highlighted recently with the launch of OpenClaw, which connects to AI models like the ones from Anthropic and OpenAI, and also runs locally on users’ devices, like the new Anthropic feature, the report added.

CNBC also cited a recent interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who called OpenClaw “the next ChatGPT,” a reference to OpenAI’s chatbot. Nvidia itself has just debuted NemoClaw, an enterprise-focused version of OpenClaw.

More recently, China’s Tencent introduced its own version of OpenClaw, known as Clawboy. It is accessible via WeChat, the country’s most popular messaging app.

Writing about the rise of OpenClaw last month, PYMNTS argued that this AI assistant had demonstrated something businesses can no longer ignore.

“An AI agent operating through APIs can browse the web, read email, access files, run software and initiate transactions without a human driving each step,” that report said. “It does not rely on interfaces designed for people. It interacts directly with programmatic endpoints. That is a different kind of software user, and it requires a different kind of software product.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown a spike in interest in agentic AI among chief product officers (CPOs) over the past year. In August, 52% of companies surveyed told PYMNTS they were just “considering” or “exploring” agentic AI. That figure had fallen to 30% three months later.

“In other words, a big chunk of the enterprise market moved out of the window-shopping phase,” that report said. “What replaced the passive interest is hands-on implementation. In November, nearly 1 in 4 CPOs reported that they were either piloting agentic AI or fully using it in production processes, up from just 3% in August.”

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