Quoting Felix Rieseberg
Anthropic's new Cowork runs inference and a per-session sandbox VM entirely in the cloud.
Felix Rieseberg described a redesign of Anthropic's Cowork. Previously, model inference ran in the cloud while tool calls executed in an Anthropic virtual machine on the user's computer, adding disk, battery, and performance cost and stopping work when the laptop closed. The new version runs both inference and the VM in the cloud, isolating each session in its own sandbox and retrieving files from the device only when required.
- Old Cowork ran cloud inference but executed tools in a local Anthropic virtual machine.
- The local VM raised disk, battery, and performance costs and stopped when the laptop closed.
- The new design runs inference and the VM in the cloud, with one sandbox per session.
- Session sandboxes do not share state and fetch device files only when needed.
From the original article
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.
simonwillison.net
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