Picture this: you’re in an airport, forty-five minutes from your flight, and you just remembered you need a full competitive analysis, a redlined contract summary, and a research brief ready before your 9 AM tomorrow. Your laptop is in your bag. You could dig it out, find a power outlet, set up at a gate — or you could pull out your phone, fire off three instructions to Claude, and board the plane knowing the work is running on your desktop while you’re in the air.
That’s what Claude Dispatch makes possible. And it matters more than it looks like at first glance.
The premise is simple: your desktop is always on. You’re not always at it. Dispatch closes that gap. It’s a feature inside Claude Cowork — Anthropic’s desktop app — that lets you remote-control your Claude session from your phone. You send an instruction from mobile, your desktop Claude executes it. You don’t need to be sitting there. You just need to have left the app running.
Launched March 17, 2026, currently in research preview on Max and Pro plans. Here’s how to get it running and, more importantly, how to actually use it.
Step 1: What Dispatch Is and Why It Changes How You Work
Most people treat AI tools as synchronous. You sit down, you prompt, you wait, you read, you iterate. Everything happens in the same session, at the same desk, in the same window of time. That model made sense when AI was a search replacement. It doesn’t make sense when AI can execute multi-hour research tasks, draft entire documents, or process large datasets without you doing anything.
The problem isn’t that Claude is too slow. It’s that you can’t always be at your desktop when you want to start work — and by the time you get there, you’ve lost the window to queue something meaningful before a meeting, before a flight, before the end of the day.
Dispatch solves the activation gap. The instruction you couldn’t send because you weren’t at your desk can now be sent from wherever you are. Your desktop — which is running anyway — picks it up and executes it.
The practical shift this creates: you stop thinking about AI tasks as things you do at your desk and start thinking about them as things you deploy. You’re in a cab, you remember you need a summary of last quarter’s earnings calls before the board meeting. You send it from your phone. By the time you’re through security, it’s done. You’re in a meeting that runs long, and you want Claude to start pulling together the market sizing you need for your next call. You excuse yourself, send the instruction from the hallway, and it’s running before you’re back in the room.
This is the remote work angle that most coverage of Dispatch misses. It’s not just for people working from home or on the road — it’s for anyone whose best thinking about what they need happens when they’re away from their keyboard. Which is most people, most of the time.
The only hard requirement: your desktop must be running Claude Cowork and connected to the internet when the instruction arrives. Close your laptop and you’ve closed the connection. Leave it running and the desktop becomes a persistent compute resource you can trigger from anywhere.
Step 2: Setup — Enabling Dispatch and Linking Your Mobile
You need Claude Cowork installed on your desktop and the Claude mobile app on your phone. Both need to be signed into the same Anthropic account on a Max or Pro plan. That’s the full requirements list.
On desktop:
Open Claude Cowork. Go to Settings. Under the Cowork section, find Dispatch — it’ll be labeled as a research preview feature. Toggle it on. You’ll see a confirmation that your desktop session is now reachable from your mobile device when this machine is running and connected.
That’s the full desktop setup. No API keys, no configuration files, no webhooks to configure. Cowork handles the connection layer.
On mobile:
Open the Claude app on your iPhone or Android device. In the bottom nav or the menu (varies slightly by platform), look for the Dispatch icon — it appears after you’ve enabled it on desktop. Tap it. You’ll see the connection status: either your desktop is online and reachable, or it isn’t.
If your desktop is running and connected, the status shows green. If you turned off your laptop without leaving Cowork running, it’ll show as offline.
Permissions to know about:
Dispatch respects the same permissions and tool access your desktop Claude session has. If you’ve connected Claude Code, file system access, or any MCP integrations to your Cowork session, those tools are available to instructions you send via Dispatch. If you haven’t, Dispatch can still execute any task that doesn’t require local file access — research, drafting, analysis, synthesis.
One thing worth knowing upfront: Dispatch sends your instruction to your existing desktop session. It’s not spawning a new session — it’s sending a message to the Claude instance already running on your machine. If you had an active conversation open when you left your desk, Dispatch picks up in that context unless you specify otherwise. If you want a fresh task to run without prior context, note that in your instruction.
Step 3: Your First Remote Instruction
Before building out power workflows, run one task end-to-end. This is the step that makes Dispatch real rather than theoretical.
Leave your desktop running with Claude Cowork open. Walk away from it — go to another room, or step outside. Pull out your phone and open the Claude app.
Tap into Dispatch. Confirm your desktop shows as online.
Send this instruction:
Summarize the current competitive landscape for [your industry]. I need: the three most active competitors right now, what each one is doing that’s working, and the one move any of them could make in the next six months that would be a real threat to us. We are [one sentence description of your company]. Use publicly available information. Have this ready when I get back to my desk.
Send it. Put your phone away. Go back to your desk in ten or fifteen minutes.
What you’ll find: Claude executed the task against your instruction, in your desktop session, without you sitting there. The output is waiting for you.
This is the moment that reframes how you use the tool. The instruction you couldn’t send because you weren’t at your keyboard can now be sent from anywhere. The gap between “I need this” and “I’m at my desk to start it” disappears.
Run this once on something real. The mechanics become obvious in one use.
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