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Anthropic's Cowork merge puts a scheduled background agent inside the main Claude app
Anthropic has merged Cowork, which has run scheduled jobs after the user closes the laptop since July, into the main Claude app. Against OpenAI's new Dots, a team's choice comes down to what starts each agent and which apps it can reach.
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What happened
- OpenAI's Dots, launched at DevDay on Tuesday, give each always-on agent its own cloud computer and browser, connected to the 4,000-plus apps that already plug into ChatGPT.
- Meta's Muse and xAI's Grok Bot, which shipped in August, both reached users before Dots did.
- In Jessica Wachtel's test across three developer tasks on The New Stack, Claude and ChatGPT tied on accuracy, with ChatGPT faster and Claude more thorough.
- The foundation behind OpenClaw, the project this wave of agents grew out of, released an early pre-1.0 enterprise edition on Tuesday for companies to try internally.
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Why it matters
- cost Even a one-Dot pilot takes either ChatGPT Pro, priced at $100 to $500 a month, or a Business Premium or Enterprise account, so OpenAI's per-agent compute is billed to the team before its first job runs.
- decision A team weighing Claude against Dots is choosing what wakes the agent up, and it has to establish Cowork's app reach on its own before the two can be compared on connectors.
- contradiction Cowork's scheduled cloud jobs shipped July 7, two days before Work mode arrived on July 9, yet The New Stack's own table files Anthropic as a copier two months behind by dating the September merge.
- precedent Burns expects a feature one lab ships to reach rivals within weeks or months, so a trigger or connector missing from either product today is a weak reason to switch platforms.
OpenAI's own example shows how a Dot starts work. A bug alert lands in Slack, and the Dot begins digging on its own [3]. Cowork is described in terms of schedules. According to Matt Burns's newsletter at The New Stack, it runs scheduled jobs after the user closes the laptop [5]. Both run in the cloud [2][6].
A scheduled job fires at a set time and fetches what it was told to fetch. An event-driven agent fires when an upstream system changes, so its value depends on which systems it can watch. Connector reach is the second thing to compare. The newsletter reports a count for Dots [2]. It does not report one for Cowork, or say whether Cowork can start work from an alert the way OpenAI's example does [5].
Connector reach also depends on the far side. Meta's Muse has connectors to Shopify and Stripe checkout that let its agents buy things [11]. Amazon started blocking Muse two weeks after launch, according to the newsletter [12].
The cloud machine per agent sets OpenAI's price. Sam Altman called Dots a premium product because each one needs so much compute, Burns reports [10]. Meta took the other route with Muse, offering a free tier and paid plans at $20 and $100 a month [11].
Self-hosting is the older model, and its record is short. Peter Steinberger pushed Clawdbot to GitHub last November as a weekend project [13]. It ran on a spare machine, accepted instructions through WhatsApp or Telegram, and used Claude for most of its work [13]. Anthropic sent lawyers in January, and the project was renamed Moltbot, then renamed again to OpenClaw a couple of days later [19]. Security became a headache for the project, and in February Steinberger joined OpenAI [14].
The newsletter's one head-to-head result is Jessica Wachtel's test [8]. Burns cites it next to Cowork and OpenAI's earlier Work mode, and Dots only launched on Tuesday [7][1]. For the result to transfer, a team's recurring jobs would have to resemble those three developer tasks.
Burns wrote that "Always-on agents are too young to have a winner, and the moats are shallow" [16]. Anthropic shipped its version without a cute name or a fuzzy mascot, in his words [18]. A platform team gets one fewer name for its vendor register.
I think the choice follows from the jobs a team already has. A nightly report or a weekly sync fits a scheduled agent inside the Claude app the team already uses [5]. Work that starts with an alert fits the event-driven design OpenAI has documented [3].
What to watch
- Anthropic documenting which apps Cowork connects to and whether it can start a job from an event such as a Slack alert.
- A head-to-head test of Dots against Claude on recurring jobs, beyond the three developer tasks Wachtel ran.
- Whether other large sites follow Amazon in blocking Muse-style agents and shrink the reach these connector catalogues advertise.