Cowork on mobile: steering from away

An agent's whole value is that it works while you do not. Cowork already runs tasks in the background; mobile changes where you stand while it does. The useful mental model is a remote control, not a cockpit: from the phone you start, check on, and redirect, while the real work — and the real reviewing — lives elsewhere.

What travels, and what does not

The key fact is where the work runs, and it splits cleanly.

Cloud sessions travel completely. "When using Cowork in the cloud, Claude's work runs on Anthropic's servers instead of your computer, and your sessions and files are saved to your Claude account", which means "The same sessions and files are available on desktop, web, and mobile". Start on the laptop, check from the train, redirect from the sofa — one session, seen from three windows. The work is server-side, so it "continues in the background" whether or not the app is open.

Local reach stays tethered to the desktop. The strong capability has a hard condition: "A cloud session can read and write files in folders you've connected on your computer only while the desktop app is open on that computer and the session was started on desktop". So anything touching your actual machine is a desktop-anchored task you monitor from the phone, not one the phone can perform alone. The general cloud-vs-local governance split is exactly what you are choosing between when you pick where to start.

Dispatch: the phone as a trigger for desktop work

For the case where you want desktop power without desktop presence, there is Dispatch: "With Dispatch, you can message Claude from your phone and have it work on your desktop computer, using your local files, connectors, plugins, and apps, then come back to the finished work". The physics are unchanged, and worth internalising: "Dispatch runs your tasks on your desktop, so your computer needs to be awake and the Claude Desktop app open while Claude works". It is a limited beta for some Pro and Max plans; the phone is the trigger, the desktop is still the engine. The one-line division it ships with is a useful map of the whole product: "Development tasks run in Claude Code; knowledge work runs in Cowork".

Steering is the mobile-native skill

What the phone is genuinely good at is the mid-task correction. You can "From your phone, you can hand Claude tasks that use everything on your desktop, including things you can't open on your phone". And, more valuably, you catch a run heading the wrong way and redirect it before it spends an hour going there. This is the mobile-shaped version of writing a good goal: the goal starts the run, and the steer keeps it honest.

The discipline is reviewing output. A phone screen is enough to notice a run is off; it is rarely enough to approve the result. Steering ("no, not that folder", "stop, use the draft instead") fits the surface. Final approval of a diff or a document belongs on glass, and the step trail is what you scroll to steer from.

What goes wrong

Approving what you only glanced at. The run finished, the phone shows a tidy summary, and you tap approve on work you did not actually review. The summary is the agent's account of itself, not the artefact.

Expecting local files without the desktop awake. The task stalls or silently narrows because the desktop app closed or the machine slept. Local reach has a power cord.

Starting local when you meant portable. A desktop-started local session does not travel; if you wanted to pick it up on the train, it needed to be a cloud session from the start.

Fire-and-forget on a connected account. Kicking off an agent with live connectors from the phone and not watching is running unattended with worse visibility, not better.

Context split across surfaces. Steering one session while a half-related chat sits on the laptop, neither aware of the other.

How to check it worked

Run one real task the mobile way on purpose: start it (cloud, if you want it to travel), leave, check in once to steer, and then — this is the test — notice where you are when you do the final review. If you approved the result on the phone, ask whether you actually verified it or just saw it was done. Steering from anywhere is the win; approving from anywhere is the trap wearing the win's clothes.