Send Claude a task from your phone on the train. By the time you sit down at your desk, the spreadsheet is waiting for you.
That's the pitch behind Dispatch, a new feature inside Anthropic's Cowork workspace that just entered research preview for Pro and Max plan subscribers. The concept is simple: you maintain a single continuous thread with Claude that syncs between your mobile app and desktop app. You assign work from wherever you are, and Claude executes it on your desktop using your local files, connected apps, and plugins.
How It Actually Works
Dispatch runs on your desktop machine, which means your computer needs to be awake and the Claude Desktop app needs to be open. You fire off a request from the mobile app (iOS or Android), and Claude gets to work on your desktop - pulling from local spreadsheets, searching Slack, drafting documents from Google Drive files, organizing folders. When it finishes, it messages you the result rather than walking you through every step.
Some examples from the documentation:
- Extract data from a local spreadsheet and compile a formatted report
- Search through Slack conversations and email, then draft a memo
- Build a comparison table from cloud files
- Organize and process files across folders
The key constraint: this is a single continuous thread, not a task queue. You cannot manage multiple parallel threads, there are no completion notifications pushed to your phone, and there is no scheduling. Claude also will not reach out proactively - it only responds to tasks you explicitly assign.
The Bigger Picture
Dispatch is Anthropic's answer to a real friction point. Most people interact with AI in discrete sessions: open the app, type a prompt, get a response, close the app. Dispatch treats Claude more like a coworker you can hand things off to asynchronously. The mobile-to-desktop bridge matters because the tasks people want AI to handle often require access to files and tools that only exist on their work computer.
The "computer must be awake" requirement is a practical limitation that keeps this grounded. Anthropic is not running your desktop remotely from the cloud - Claude needs your actual machine and its file system. That is both a feature (your data stays local) and a constraint (forget to leave your laptop open and nothing happens).
Dispatch is available now as a research preview on Pro ($20/month) and Max plans. You will need the latest versions of both the Claude Desktop and mobile apps.