Quoting Felix Rieseberg
Anthropic moved Cowork’s VM off the user’s machine and into a per-session cloud sandbox.
Felix Rieseberg says the old local VM helped with capability, safety, and security, but cost users disk, battery, and performance. The new Cowork runs both model inference and the VM in the cloud, with each session isolated from the others. Local file access still goes through the desktop app when the cloud VM needs something from the user’s device. Rieseberg says the change is meant to make Cowork usable from phones, keep work running, and avoid draining battery on the VM. Simon Willison's note
Felix Rieseberg says the old local VM helped with capability, safety, and security, but cost users disk, battery, and performance. The new Cowork runs both model inference and the VM in the cloud, with each session isolated from the others. Local file access still goes through the desktop app when the cloud VM needs something from the user’s device. Rieseberg says the change is meant to make Cowork usable from phones, keep work running, and avoid draining battery on the VM. Simon Willison's note
score 6