Cowork signals llm os shift

Anthropic’s new Cowork thing is probably their clearest “LLM OS” move so far. Under the hood, it’s basically a Claude Agent SDK wrapped in a persistent desktop agent that lives in a VM sandbox. It can talk to connectors, use a browser, and touch the local filesystem, all while pretending to be “just another app” on your machine. The interesting bit is where this shifts the game. We’re moving from “who has the nicest chat UI” to “who safely owns long‑running, multi‑tool workflows on the client.” Think less chatbot, more headless engineer that quietly runs for hours, wiring together APIs, files, and web tasks without burning your laptop down. For founders, this raises a few questions: - Do you build directly on top of this and treat Cowork as your agent host? - Do you compete by owning your own sandbox and workflow engine? - Or do you specialize, and let Anthropic handle the scary sandbox stuff? We’re basically in the early “Windows for agents” era. Cowork is Anthropic saying, “We’d like to be your local agent runtime, thanks,” with security and workflow control as the new battleground.