Hi everyone 👋

Welcome back to this week's issue

You are in a meeting, but you remember you need to have your competitive analysis prepared for a 4 PM call. Before today, you had two choices: you could try to get it done at your desk during lunch, or you could hope that someone else would get it done.

With the new feature, which was just released on March 17, 2026, called Dispatch by Anthropic, which is now available in Claude Cowork, you can pull out your phone, type in what you need to get done, put your phone back in your pocket, and go back to your meeting. By the time you sit back down at your desk, it is complete

That’s not a marketing promise, An X/Twitter user put it to the test, using it continuously for 48 straight hours, running over 60 task sessions, all of which came straight from his phone. His conclusion is unequivocal: it’s not Claude on your phone; it’s a command center – and that makes all the difference

Dispatch is a new feature within Claude Cowork. It’s not a new product, not a new app. It’s a way for the Claude app on your phone and a Cowork session on your desktop to connect and share a single conversation thread. The phone sends the instructions. The desktop does the work. And then you’re left with the finished results.

The architecture is also intentionally simple: your desktop is your executor, your phone is your interface. All AI processing is done locally on your machine, not in the cloud, not on your phone. Claude also has access to all that you have already set up in Cowork—files, connectors, plugins, MCP servers—without any further setup on your mobile device.

The key word in this architecture is the word "persistent." It is not a new session every time the user opens the application. It is one conversation thread that is synced across both devices. The context is preserved. You can check in on the middle of the task, respond with a follow-up, or continue with what you were doing from either device.

Wietse Hage of AI Report showed this in action. He took his phone in the middle of the presentation and started typing away: "Find that pannacotta recipe that is somewhere as a PDF on my desktop." Claude searched tens of thousands of files on his home computer and found it. From his phone. While he was explaining it to the audience.

When you dispatch a task from your phone, Dispatch does not use a single agent, but dispatches to the appropriate environment depending on what the task needs. Development work, such as Claude Code, runs development tasks. Knowledge work, such as documents, research, analysis, file management, runs in Cowork. These sessions are displayed in their respective sidebars on your desktop. You can click in for more information, or you can wait for the result in the thread.

Claude sends you the result in a message: spreadsheet, memo, comparison table, and draft. You don’t watch every step. You delegate and come back. Push notifications inform you when the task is complete or when Claude needs your input to continue.

Dispatch will inherit all that you have set up in Cowork. There is no need to set anything up specifically for mobile. If you have set up Gmail, Slack, Notion, and Google Drive on your desktop, all of that is also available with an instruction from your phone using Dispatch. Your desktop apps will also be accessible via computer use by Claude, if you have set up that permission.

The variety of tasks is extensive because Dispatch inherits the full feature set of Cowork. Users led sessions on content creation, competitive research, client communication, and file organization, all using his phone, while Claude did the execution using his desktop.

While sub-tasks do eventually access your CLAUDE.md file, the point is that the orchestrator has already defined the prompt based on their own set of assumptions. It’s not until later that your context is available. This is an issue for teams and individuals who rely heavily on their CLAUDE.md file to maintain their tone, format, and other workflow rules.

Fix right now: Explicitly tell Dispatch to read your CLAUDE.md at the start of each instruction. Don't assume it knows your setup. Example: "Read my CLAUDE.md first, then draft the weekly client update using the email template defined there."

This is simply a limitation in the research preview and not an architectural flaw. They will correct this in days or weeks. Until then, it is advisable that you proactively include CLAUDE.md in your Dispatch messages.

Placing the mobile interface in remote control of your desktop AI agent creates a chain of consequences. A command from your phone can instruct Claude to read, move, or delete files on your local disk, interact with connected services, control your web browser, and launch desktop applications. A mistake or malicious input Claude receives in mid-task can have consequences that are hard or impossible to reverse.

Anthropic's own documentation is unusually direct about this: "Only connect these agents if you're comfortable with what they could do, not just what you intend them to do."

Practical guidance from power users who've been testing this:

Wietse Hage from AI Report mentioned he hasn't enabled mouse and keyboard control yet — just file access. That's a reasonable starting posture for most users. The capability is there when you need it; you don't have to enable everything at once.

Dispatch is a feature of a larger architectural movement. Claude, Cowork, Web, and now Dispatch are all moving towards the same place. Claude reads them in every time – Code, Cowork, Web, Dispatch. Close one of them, switch devices, switch apps – the context is always the same.

The seams are still visible. Dispatch needs your PC awake. Scheduled tasks don't work in cloud sessions. Loop sessions expire after 3 days. Claude Code on the web can't render artifacts. Cowork has no native GitHub sync. But within a year, these surfaces come significantly closer. The teams building each one are clearly heading in the same direction.

For teams and individuals that invest in Claude workflows today, that’s the strategic takeaway from the Dispatch announcement. Develop your context in portable, surface-agnostic files. Let the surfaces evolve around them.

Dispatch is new behavior from an AI product. It’s not a chatbot in a different form factor. It’s not a chat interface on mobile. It’s not a walkie-talkie to a running desktop agent that uses your files, your apps, your integrations, and your calendar while you’re somewhere else.

It’s a research preview, and it shows. The CLAUDE.md orchestration gap, the folder path workaround, and the machine-must-stay-awake constraint are real-world issues that will ultimately restrict the number of people who can use it in an unencumbered fashion. However, the architecture is sound, and the real-world potential especially if you’re already heavily invested in a well-designed Cowork setup is huge.

The teams most likely to get value out of Dispatch right now are those who have already developed skills, commands, and CLAUDE.md files that make short instructions high-leverage. "Run the weekly report." "Draft the client update." "Review this PR with the standard checklist." If your system is well-organized, a simple text message is all you need. If not, Dispatch will highlight the problem more than anything else.

Thanks for reading.

— Rakesh's Newsletter