Over the past weeks I switched a lot of my Cowork complex work to new Claude Projects (confusingly, it is not the same as the old Projects in Claude, instead, it persistently chats with a dedicated cloud VM). I found it to be much better in most ways, but not clearly documented.
Cowork moves inference and VM to the cloud, with local file access
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Ethan Mollick reports that he moved much of his complex Cowork work to the new Claude Projects, which persistently chat with a dedicated cloud VM, finding them much better in most ways but poorly documented.
Felix Rieseberg, who works on Cowork, explains that the new version runs model inference and the VM in the cloud, with each session in its own sandbox that is destroyed when the session ends.
Files are accessed only from folders the user explicitly adds, with the desktop app handling those requests.
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@emollick
Hi! I work on Cowork. Probably no surprise, but we want to make our users as powerful as possible with Claude - and you're right that explaining and keeping up with the capabilities is hard. Affected users got both an email and an in-app notice, but I'm grateful for the feedback - I think this change was more surprising to people than I'd like it to be. This one will be a longer explainer, bear with me! The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved what they were able to do with Claude but didn't love the disk, battery, and performance cost of running the VM locally. Also, people didn't love that closing your laptop means the work stops. The "new" version of Cowork runs model inference and the VM in the cloud. Each session gets its own sandbox, not sharing state with other sessions. When the VM needs something on the users' device (like a file), the desktop app is responsible for that file access tool call. To be clear, Claude will only access files in folders that the user explicitly added to the session, the same way Claude only saw files explicitly added to the VM in the "old" version. Sandboxes are destroyed when the session ends! We think this solves a lot of problems we've heard about (like using Cowork from a phone, keeping work running, or getting all the same power without losing battery to the VM) - but we'll keep iterating on new feedback we hear!View quoted post on X
Source: Ethan Mollick · x.comPublished · added here