On March 17, 2026, Anthropic released Dispatch for Claude Cowork.

Cowork is a desktop AI agent that manages your files, browser, apps, calendar, and code. Dispatch is the mobile layer: text Claude from your phone while you are away, and it executes tasks on your desktop at home. Scheduled automations. Recurring digests. Cross-device context that persists between sessions. Continuous handoffs from phone to desktop and back.

You control it through your phone. It runs on your local machine around the clock. It takes autonomous action without you being present.

So, it’s basically OpenClaw?

It’s pretty similar…

Anthropic's version is will probably satisfy most people’s OpenClaws uses without the hassle, security risks and complicated setup.

Cowork runs in a sandboxed environment, which means Claude operates inside a controlled virtual machine rather than with full access to your system. Before it touches anything sensitive, it shows you a plan and asks for approval. It cannot accidentally reach outside the boundary you set. There is a polished app, customer support, and it works without any technical setup.

OpenClaw gives you full system access, works with any AI model including local ones, is completely free, and runs on Linux servers and headless machines that Cowork cannot touch. The power users and developers who built their workflows around it are not switching to a $20-a-month locked Claude subscription.

OpenClaw is Still Amazing

OpenClaw is still live. Still open-source. Still free. The community has kept building. There are forks, extensions, new integrations added every week. Steinberger's departure to OpenAI did not kill the project - it decentralized it in the way open-source projects often do when a founder steps back.

Cowork and Dispatch are in research preview for Pro subscribers at $20 a month. It is early, but the trajectory is clear: Anthropic is building toward an always-on AI that runs your computer, and they now have the resources and distribution to do it properly.

The developers who ran Clawdbot in January are mostly still running OpenClaw.

The people who were never going to do that are now discovering Dispatch for the first time and calling it revolutionary.