Anthropic Shipped What OpenAI Couldn't

The line everyone's been chasing is the jump from "AI chatbot" to "AI coworker." A chatbot waits for you. A coworker works while you're gone. Plenty of companies have promised that leap. Anthropic just shipped a real version of it.

It's called Dispatch, and it changes the shape of the workday.

Send from your phone, come back to results

Dispatch for Claude Cowork lets you send tasks from your phone while Claude does the work on your desktop. You fire off the request, you go live your life, and your computer at home grinds through the job. You come back to finished work, not a half-started draft.

That's the whole shift in one feature. The AI keeps working when you walk away, which is exactly the thing a chatbot can't do.

A chatbot stops when you close the tab. A coworker keeps going. Dispatch is the second one.

Why this is the coworker moment

The reason this matters more than another model bump is what it removes, the need to be present. Real coworkers don't need you hovering. They take the task and run it. Dispatch is the first time that's genuinely true for an AI doing your desktop work.

It reframes the question from "what can the AI answer" to "what can the AI finish while I'm not even here." (And yes, the slightly unsettling part is that the honest answer is increasingly "a lot.")

Hand Claude a real task on your way out the door and check the results when you're back. That's the fastest way to feel the difference between a chatbot and a coworker.