Anthropic ships Dispatch — persistent background Claude agent you can task from your phone

Anthropic shipped Dispatch, a new research preview feature inside Claude Cowork (Claude Desktop). The feature keeps one persistent Claude conversation running continuously on the user's desktop. Users can message it from their phone while away — assigning tasks, checking in, or asking questions — and return to finished work. Setup requires downloading Claude Desktop and pairing a phone to the persistent session. The announcement was made by Felix Rieseberg, an engineer on Claude Desktop, and pulled over 791,000 views within hours.

Dispatch is the first consumer-facing implementation of Claude as a true background agent — the async, fire-and-forget delegation model that has previously been limited to API-level integrations. It's a meaningful UX shift: Claude stops being a chat interface you have to be present for and becomes an ambient assistant that works while you're away from your desk. The 'message from your phone, come back to finished work' framing is deliberately simple, but it describes something that frontier labs have been inching toward for years. If Dispatch works reliably, it changes how people think about what AI is for.