r/singularity treats Anthropic Dispatch as the next step toward phone-first AI coworkers

A March 24, 2026 thread in r/singularity, with roughly 250 upvotes and more than 40 comments, treated Anthropic's new Dispatch and computer use pairing as a sign that AI assistants are moving from chat windows into persistent operating-system level workflows. The post linked to Anthropic's product note, which says Claude Cowork and Claude Code can now use the computer directly when no connector is available.

The practical pitch is simple. Dispatch lets a user hand off a task from a phone and pick it up later on desktop. Computer use fills the last mile by allowing Claude to open files, navigate the browser, click through interfaces, and run dev tools automatically. Anthropic says the system will still prefer structured connectors like Slack or Google Calendar first, but can fall back to the mouse, keyboard, screen, and browser when integrations run out.

The feature is in research preview for Claude Pro and Max subscribers.

It currently works on macOS only, with the desktop app awake and paired to the mobile app.

Anthropic says Claude asks permission before accessing new applications and uses activation scanning aimed at prompt injection detection.

The subreddit reaction split along two predictable lines. Optimists read this as the beginning of an everyday, always-available AI coworker that can bridge email, coding, browsing, and personal admin without requiring perfect APIs for every service. Several commenters immediately framed it as competitive pressure on OpenAI and the rest of the frontier-model pack. Skeptics focused on the constraints: macOS-first rollout, early reliability limits, and the fact that screen-driven automation is slower and less trustworthy than direct integrations.

Those caveats matter because Anthropic's own blog is unusually explicit about them. The company says computer use is still early, can make mistakes, and should not be pointed at sensitive data. Even so, r/singularity read the launch as meaningful because it combines three layers that had mostly been separate until now: mobile assignment, desktop execution, and agentic fallback to UI control. If that bundle works well enough, the product story shifts from "ask a model a question" to "assign a task and come back later." Primary source: Anthropic Dispatch and computer use. Community discussion: r/singularity.