I'm of the opinion that anthropic's "moral" stances are bullshit, not particularly coherent when you dig deep and more about branding. If so, this is grade A marketing.
They want to present themselves as moral. What better endorsement than by being rejected by the US military under Trump? You get the people who hate trump and the people who hate the military in one swoop.
At the same time its kind of a non story. Anrhropic says it doesn't want its products used in certain ways, US military says fine, you can't be part of the project where we are going to make the AI do those things. Isn't that a win for both sides ? What's the problem?
It would be like someone part of a boycott movement being surprised the company they are boycotting doesn't want to hire them.
Everyone close to Anthropic leadership has claimed they’re the real deal and it’s not a stunt. I don’t think it’s bull. They are trying to find a reasonable middle ground and settled on some red lines they won’t cross.
Claude Cowork uses the Claude Code agent harness running inside a Linux VM (with additional sandboxing, network controls, and filesystem mounts). We run that through Apple's virtualization framework or Microsoft's Host Compute System. This buys us three things we like a lot:
(1) A computer for Claude to write software in, because so many user problems can be solved really well by first writing custom-tailored scripts against whatever task you throw at it. We'd like that computer to not be _your_ computer so that Claude is free to configure it in the moment.
(2) Hard guarantees at the boundary: Other sandboxing solutions exist, but for a few reasons, none of them satisfy as much and allow us to make similarly sound guarantees about what Claude will be able to do and not to.
(3) As a product of 1+2, more safety for non-technical users. If you're reading this, you're probably equipped to evaluate whether or not a particular script or command is safe to run - but most humans aren't, and even the ones who are so often experience "approval fatigue". Not having to ask for approval is valuable.
It's a real trade-off though and I'm thankful for any feedback, including this one. We're reading all the comments and have some ideas on how to maybe make this better - for people who don't want to use Cowork at all, who don't want it inside a VM, or who just want a little bit more control. Thank you!