Why would engineers from a $650 billion Chinese company deploy an open-source AI agent built by an Austrian onto random people\u2019s laptops? But it seems many Chinese AI startups are all trying to \u201craise a lobster\u201d with government encouragement.<\/p>\n
I looked at\u00a0NanoClaw<\/a>\u00a0two weeks ago, which is a much safer version of its bigger crustacean brother, but it was never going to be long before a company as quick-witted as Anthropic got into a craze originating from its own work.<\/p>\n The basic three foundations of OpenClaw we\u2019ve now seen in multiple places: An LLM agent, with access to a local drive, controlled via mobile messaging. Like bankruptcy, the audience for this caught on gradually, then suddenly. The user can now do real work, with AI, via the software they are already totally familiar with. That is the offer that others are trying to measure up to.<\/p>\n I want to quickly mirror one of\u00a0Azeem Azhar<\/a>\u2019s points \u2014 that while Apple has done nothing notable in the AI software space, their hardware is well-suited for running agentic (i.e., actual computing) tasks. Their family of Apple Silicon chips, replacing Intel chips, is well-suited for\u00a0local on-device inference. This is why the Mac Mini, a computer that a whole generation has probably never heard of, is selling out in stores.<\/p>\n OpenClaws vital weakness (lack of secure boundaries and guardrails) is also its strength \u2013 you can try anything, and it might just work. Naturally, no company that could be sued would follow this inflammable route.<\/p>\n The first stab at the mobile communication piece from Anthropic was Claude Remote Control<\/a>, which dropped last month. This worked with Claude Code and Simon Willison<\/a> described it as \u201cjanky.\u201d<\/p>\n Enter Claude Dispatch for Cowork<\/p>\n But now there is Claude Dispatch for Cowork<\/a>. You already get two pieces of the trifecta with Cowork \u2014 AI agents working with your local drive, without having to grok MCP.<\/p>\n If you have a Pro plan, you can try this research preview.<\/p>\n First, make sure your Claude Desktop is up to date. If you remember, you can start Cowork<\/a> from a tab within it.<\/p>\n Looking at my Desktop Apps File menu, I can immediately see I need an update<\/p>\n And after updating, when I restart Claude Desktop, I see this:<\/p>\n So by hitting Dispatch, we see the steps needed are quite straightforward:<\/p>\n The new piece is that we also need an app for the phone. Now, I wouldn\u2019t say this is dropping the ball, yet this isn\u2019t like using WhatsApp. We need to install a new app just to talk to Claude. However, it is of course far safer and likely the correct first move for Anthropic. I didn\u2019t have the Claude app (because I absolutely didn\u2019t need it), but I installed it on my Android to complete the chain.<\/p>\n The final setup tells us quite a bit about what is going on<\/p>\n (I am not entirely sure of what \u201cClaude in Chrome\u201d is, but it appeared to be another beta plugin. You may have seen my article on WebMCP<\/a> this week.)<\/p>\n Instead of starting a new session for each task, you have a single persistent thread with Claude Dispatch. This thread doesn\u2019t reset \u2013 Claude retains context from previous tasks, so you can pick up where you left off \u2013 on laptop or phone. In fact, it is quite hard to restart even if you want to.<\/p>\n After logging in and fiddling with my phone, I saw the link to the Dispatch thread, and we were off.<\/p>\n I thought I\u2019d try to find a passport scan \u2014 which is actually something suggested in the Claude Cowork hints. I started on my laptop to check things out first:<\/p>\n I needed to talk to Google Drive. Although Claude didn\u2019t know it could do this, fortunately, the web did \u2013 I just had to add a connector:<\/p>\n I realised it had access to the Drive on the web, not the actual folder, which was odd. However, I gave it access and carried on.<\/p>\n As expected, it worked like a walkie-talkie \u2014 with any requests typed on my phone getting \u201cdispatched\u201d onto the laptop:<\/p>\n Unfortunately, after multiple permission requests, it just gave up on the query and died.<\/p>\n I was going to keep trying, maybe by telling it about a specific folder, but I realised I wouldn\u2019t know whether the problem was with Cowork or Dispatch, and I would be missing the point. I could clearly see that the remote control aspect was working fine. And yet I\u2019m not sure whether this advances the case for putting down OpenClaw and waiting for Anthropic to pick up the slack.<\/p>\n Raising a lobster<\/p>\n I\u2019m wondering whether this approach \u2014 while a good start \u2014 will leave Anthropic too far behind OpenClaw. Even if this becomes less fiddly, a single continuous thread controlled by an app to give you a walkie-talkie is just more Anthropic-specific machinery. And users aren\u2019t asking for a walkie-talkie to a session \u2014 they just want to find that passport scan.<\/p>\n It feels like a bit more work is needed to find the right framing that keeps things secure while remaining flexible enough to compress the distance between curiosity and adoption.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/4a243a62-image.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2d5aa649-image-1-1024x430.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/4524a5a8-image-2-845x1024.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/b5a74737-image-3-821x1024.png\"){kind=spacer}
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/a56d3982-image-4-1024x523.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1d3409fd-image-5-1024x493.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1d0fca00-image-6-1024x444.png\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2e2ac7a2-cropped-a46bbf33-photo.png\"\/)
<\/p>\n