Anthropic's Cowork moves model inference and VM to the cloud

Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg announced that the new version of Cowork runs both model inference and the VM in the cloud, with each session having an isolated sandbox that does not share state with other sessions. The old version ran an Anthropic-provided VM locally to execute tool calls, and users were unhappy with its disk, battery, and performance overhead, and work would be interrupted when closing the laptop. In the new version, when the VM needs to access files on the user's device, the desktop app handles the file access tool calls.