Anthropic just made Claude Cowork significantly more useful for anyone who wants their AI to keep working after they close the laptop. The desktop app now supports scheduled recurring tasks — meaning you can set Claude to run daily research, organize folders, compile summaries, or handle any repeatable workflow automatically, whether you’re at your desk or not.
This is a meaningful shift. Cowork launched as a capable task runner, but it required you to be present to kick things off. With scheduled tasks, it starts to look a lot more like the always-on agent model that tools like OpenClaw have been built around from the start.
What Scheduling Actually Looks Like
The implementation is straightforward. Inside any Cowork task, you can use the /schedule command to set up a recurring run. The interface gives you time-based recurrence options (daily, weekly, specific times), and a dedicated “Scheduled” sidebar shows all your active scheduled tasks with their next-run timestamps and recent history.
When a scheduled task fires, it runs with the same context and tools as your manual tasks — the same connected apps, the same system integrations, the same Claude model. The key difference is that you don’t have to be there to start it.
Anthropic confirmed the feature in official release notes: “We introduced the ability to create and schedule both recurring and on-demand tasks in Cowork.” On-demand scheduling is also supported — you can queue a task to run at a specific future time once, without making it recurring.
What This Enables
The practical applications are broad:
Daily knowledge work
- Morning briefings: “Summarize my emails, flagged Slack messages, and top news from my feeds”
- Research digests: Pull and summarize recent papers or articles on specified topics
- Meeting prep: Compile context on upcoming calendar events from your notes and email
File and data maintenance
- Folder organization: Sort downloads, clean up desktop clutter on a schedule
- Report generation: Pull structured data, format it, and save or send automatically
- Backup verification: Check that backup processes completed and alert if not
Communication automation
- Draft weekly status updates using your recent work as context
- Summarize long threads before Monday morning
- Flag unresolved emails older than a threshold
The common thread is “things you do regularly that don’t require judgment in the moment.” Scheduled tasks are best suited to well-defined recurring workflows where Claude has the context it needs to act without you.
How It Compares to OpenClaw Cron
For readers of this site, the obvious comparison is OpenClaw’s cron system. The approaches reflect different design philosophies:
Cowork scheduled tasks run inside a polished desktop app with a GUI scheduler and deep integration with macOS/Windows system-level features. The experience is consumer-grade — low friction, no config files, designed for knowledge workers who aren’t necessarily technical.
OpenClaw cron is more flexible and more powerful at the cost of more setup. You configure schedules in YAML or via the CLI, can chain multi-step pipelines, run sub-agents, trigger webhooks, and integrate with arbitrary tools. It’s designed for builders who want programmable autonomy rather than a managed experience.
Today’s OpenClaw release (v2026.2.26) even fixed the preserve-due-jobs bug that caused scheduled tasks to be dropped across restarts — a reliability improvement that mirrors the same challenge Anthropic is now tackling for Cowork users.
The two products aren’t direct competitors. Cowork is a consumer desktop app; OpenClaw is an agent infrastructure platform. But they’re converging on the same core insight: useful AI agents need to run on schedules, not just on demand.
The Bigger Shift
What’s notable about this feature is less the scheduling itself and more what it signals about where Anthropic sees Cowork going. The original framing of Cowork was “AI-assisted work” — Claude as a tool you use actively. Scheduled tasks reframe it as “AI that works for you” — Claude as an autonomous operator with ongoing responsibilities.
That’s the agentic model. And Anthropic rolling it out in a consumer desktop app suggests they’re betting that mainstream users are ready for it — not just developers running infrastructure.
For the agentic AI ecosystem, more users experiencing what it means to have AI running tasks independently is a rising tide. Every person who wakes up to a completed research summary from Cowork is one more person who understands why always-on agents matter.
Sources
- The Decoder: Claude’s Cowork Desktop App Now Runs Scheduled Tasks So Your AI Assistant Works While You Sleep
- Anthropic Cowork Official Release Notes via Releasebot.io
- Simon Willison’s Blog: Claude Cowork Scheduled Tasks
- CNBC: Anthropic Cowork Desktop Expansion
Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260227-0800
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