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Claude Can Now Take Control of Your Mac
Claude:
In Claude Cowork and Claude Code, you can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks. When Claude doesn’t have access to the tools it needs, it will point, click, and navigate what’s on your screen to perform the task itself. It can open files, use the browser, and run dev tools automatically — with no setup required.
This feature is now available in research preview for Claude Pro and Max subscribers. It works especially well with Dispatch, which lets you assign Claude tasks from your phone.
I think you’re nuts if you try this on your actual Mac, with all your actual data and files. But I thought people were nuts for using a lot of bleeding edge AI features before I tried them myself. It’s certainly notable that Anthropic has shipped agentic AI on the Mac before Apple has, after Apple originally promised it to arrive a year ago.
The Claude Mac client itself remains a lazy Electron clunker. If Claude Code is so good I don’t get why they don’t prove it by using it to make an even halfway decent native Mac app.
See also: Techmeme.
WSJ: ‘OpenAI Plans Launch of Desktop “Superapp”’
Berber Jin, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.
Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus on helping the company’s sales team market the new product. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company’s computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and related organization changes, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.
The strategy change marks a major shift from last year, when OpenAI launched a series of stand-alone products that didn’t always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic.
This sounds like an utter disaster in the making. Would it make any sense for Apple to merge Safari, Messages, and Xcode into one “superapp”? No, it would not. It makes no more sense for OpenAI to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and especially Atlas together. I use and very much enjoy ChatGPT because its Mac client is such a good Mac app.
Simo came to OpenAI by way of Shopify and Instacart, so it doesn’t surprise me that she sees OpenAI’s existing product-first culture of creating well-crafted native apps as a problem, not a strength to build on. If this “superapp” plan is true, it’s going to tank everything that heretofore has been good about ChatGPT and Codex.