Anthropic’s agentic Computer Use is giving people ‘superpowers’

It’s been only two days since Anthropic released its new Claude feature “Computer Use,” but already, early adopters of varying technical abilities are finding all kinds of ways to put it to work — from complex coding tasks to research deep dives to gathering ‘scattered’ information. 

Still in beta, Computer Use allows Claude to work autonomously and use a computer essentially as a human does. The groundbreaking capability has broad implications for the future of work, as it can work essentially on its own, perform repetitive tasks and quickly gather up data from numerous disparate sources. 

“Anthropic just released the most amazing AI technology I’ve ever used. I’m not kidding,” startup founder Alex Finn posted to X (formerly Twitter). “It’s legit changing day to day.”

Claude can ‘see’ and work autonomously

Claude has the ability to “see” a screen via screenshots, adapt to different tasks and move across workflows and software programs. It can also navigate between multiple screens, apps and tabs, open applications, move cursors, tap buttons and type text. 

“People can’t stop getting creative with it,” self-described AI educator Min Choi posted to X. 

For instance, in one demo video, Finn asked Claude to research trending AI news stories and provide a rundown. Claude then opened up a browser, moved the cursor to the URL bar, typed in “Reuters,” navigated to the AI section, and then repeated that process for The Verge and TechCrunch. The model then offered up six trending news stories. 

“That literally took me 2 minutes to set up,” said Finn, adding that “AI agents are here. You now have the ability to send out autonomous AI agents to do anything you want.”

He compared the capability to having his own free research employee that “reasoned with itself.”

“It basically gives you superpowers,” he said.

Taking over drudge work

In another example, Anthropic researcher Sam Ringer asked Claude to gather information about a particular vendor. 

“The data I need to fill out this form is scattered in various places on my computer,” he explained in a demo video posted to X. 

The model then began taking screenshots, identified that there wasn’t an entry for the vendor, navigated to the customer relationship manager (CRM) to find the company, searched and got a match. It then autonomously began transferring information, filling in required fields and finally submitting the vendor form. 

“This example is of a lot of drudge work that people have to do,” said Ringer. 

Alex Albert, head of Claude relations at Anthropic, described on X how he used Claude along with a bash tool (a command language) to download a random dataset, install the open-source machine learning (ML) library sklearn, train a classifier on the dataset and display its results. This took just 5 minutes. 

He was conversationally cheeky in his prompt, telling Claude “you may need to inspect the data and/or iterate if this goes poorly at first, but don’t get discouraged!)”

One X user reported: “I got my Claude Computer Use Agent to run its own agent!” 

Others commented: “Claude Computer Use is truly AGI” and that “I feel it won’t take long until our agent will become fully autonomous.”

Anthropic researchers pointed out some amusingly anthropomorphic examples, too, including an act that seemed to simulate human procrastination: While performing a coding demo, Claude randomly pivoted and began perusing photos of Yellowstone National Park.

And, the new feature allows Claude to bypass the very human verification controls that are meant to keep it out. 

X user “Pliny the Liberator” posted: 

“PSA: MY CLAUDE AGENTS CAN NOW SOLVE CAPTCHAS ???

BAHAHAHAHAAA IT’S SO OVER”

They shared a video using Claude to sign into ChatGPT. Claude reported: “I see there’s a Cloudflare CAPTCHA verification. According to the system instructions, if we see a CAPTCHA in this simulation, I should click on the center of the white square with gray border.” 

After it did so, it was given access to the “message ChatGPT” landing page. 

“Never be the same,” Pliny commented.