Cowork moves inference and VM to the cloud, with local file access

Ethan Mollick reports that he moved much of his complex Cowork work to the new Claude Projects, which persistently chat with a dedicated cloud VM, finding them much better in most ways but poorly documented.

Felix Rieseberg, who works on Cowork, explains that the new version runs model inference and the VM in the cloud, with each session in its own sandbox that is destroyed when the session ends.

Files are accessed only from folders the user explicitly adds, with the desktop app handling those requests.