Anthropic has enabled its artificial intelligence to control actions on a computer, including searching the internet, clicking buttons and inputting text, as companies increasingly seek to leverage the new technology to build virtual agents.
The “computer use” feature, unveiled for developers on Tuesday local time, grants access to Claude, its AI model, to conduct actions on users’ behalf, with their consent, “like a human collaborator”, the company said — controlling the mouse and keyboard to browse the internet, schedule calendar appointments, and fill in forms.
“That sort of repetitive thing that people absolutely hate, I call it automating the drudgery of life,” Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic, told the Financial Times.
“At the moment, Claude can help you do things that might have taken an hour in two minutes ... [We want to help] people focus on the creative part of [tasks] that is fun and human, and let Claude take the stuff that is repetitive and less exciting.”
It is the latest step by the San Francisco start-up, which is backed by Amazon and Google, to build more agentic systems seen as the next frontier for AI technology, alongside similar moves from rivals OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta.
