Every Claude conversation you've had until now works the same way: you type, it answers, you read, you type again. Dispatch throws that loop to the curb, letting you hand off a task from your phone while the work runs on your desktop without you.

Key Takeaways

• Dispatch shifts the interaction model from a traditional back-and-forth chat to assign-and-walk-away execution: prompt from your phone, and Claude does the work on your desktop while you're away from it.

• It needs both the Cowork desktop app and the Claude mobile app installed and logged into the same account. The two devices share one synced chat.

• There are three requirements before Dispatch will run a task: the computer has to be awake, the Cowork desktop app has to be open, and you need an active internet connection.

• Two desktop settings matter before you rely on this workflow. “Keep Awake” stops your computer from sleeping mid-task. “Allow all browser actions” lets Claude act in Chrome on your behalf, which is useful but carries real risk (prompt injection, malicious sites), so use it deliberately and be very specific in your instructions.

• One current limitation: Dispatch (for now) supports a single ongoing chat. There's no way to open a second one, so every task, attachment, and piece of history accumulates in one long conversation. It feels messy because it is.

• Dispatch works through the same connectors as regular Claude (Notion, Gmail, SharePoint, and so on), so retrieval and reporting tasks aren't limited to files sitting on your local machine.

• Skills, the reusable saved workflows, can be triggered remotely through Dispatch. A multi-step process you've already built as a skill can be kicked off with a short prompt from your phone.

• Results save locally on your computer, to your Downloads folder by default unless otherwise specified, so you get a file to return to even though you triggered the work remotely.

• Dispatch is in beta as of August 2026, so I assume behavior and limitations like the single-chat constraint mentioned above are likely to change.

Setting Up and Using Claude Dispatch

Setting up Dispatch takes 90 seconds tops.

Setup

1. Install Cowork on your computer. Log into your Claude account on the web, go to the download icon at the bottom of the sidebar, and download the Cowork desktop app for Windows or Mac.

2. Install the Claude app on your phone. Download the Claude mobile app from the app store and log in with the same account.

3. Open the Dispatch tab. On either device, the sidebar now shows a Dispatch tab. Click or tap it.

4. Complete the “Get started” flow. A setup screen walks you through it: follow the prompts on your computer, then repeat the same steps on your phone. Once both devices finish, setup is done, and the two devices share a single synced Dispatch chat. Congrats, you can now build PowerPoints from anywhere (jk, but yeah, seriously).

Key settings to configure (on desktop)

1. Turn on Keep Awake if you'll be away from your computer for a while. Dispatch only works while your computer is powered on and awake, so this setting keeps it from sleeping and losing the connection.

2. Weigh Allow all browser actions carefully. It lets Claude take actions in Chrome on your behalf, which is useful for web-based tasks, but be specific in your prompts. A vague prompt risks prompt injection or Claude visiting an unsafe site.

3. Remember there's only one chat. Every task, attachment, and piece of history lives in a single continuous thread. Plan your prompts with that in mind.

Using Dispatch: three core workflows

A. Reporting and summarization

1. From your phone, open the Dispatch chat and write a specific prompt describing the report you need. For example: “Review Company ABC’s RFP and emails pertaining to the proposal. Package up a summary, key takeaways, and next steps in a one-pager.”

2. If you're using a connector like Notion, confirm it's connected first: click the + icon, go to Connectors, and confirm that the source is linked.

3. Send the prompt and walk away. Claude pulls the data through the connector and runs the task on your desktop.

4. Return to the finished file (a PPT slide, in this case) saved wherever you specified. Point it at your team's existing template instead of a blank one, and you skip worrying about formatting entirely. Claude just populates what's already there.

B. File retrieval

1. From your phone, prompt Dispatch to locate and attach a specific file. For example: “Find and attach the July 2026 Analyst Report in the Investor Relations folder.”

2. Claude searches the location you named, even when the filename doesn't obviously match what you asked for, and attaches the correct file directly in the chat within seconds.

3. This isn't limited to local files. The same approach works for anything behind a connected tool (Gmail, SharePoint, and so on), so retrieval reaches wherever you've already connected.

C. Triggering a skill

1. Beforehand, build a Claude skill for a workflow you run often. For instance: “Write a daily briefing covering the stock prices of our competitors, analyst commentary, and notable industry news over the last 24 hours.”

2. From your phone, write a prompt naming the skill and the specific input it needs. For example: “Trigger the Daily Briefing skill.”

3. Claude runs the full multi-step skill workflow (research, prioritization, compiling market data) and returns a finished output: in this example, a structured briefing that can be saved as a PDF.

4. A local copy also saves to your Downloads folder on desktop, so you can revisit the full detail later even though you triggered and consumed the task on your phone.

Dispatch, Projects, and Skills

Dispatch doesn't operate without a project. When it routes a task to Cowork, as opposed to Code, it runs that task inside one specific Cowork project: whichever one you name in your prompt, or your default project if you don't. This is great if your project contains certain reference files you want to leverage.

The Dispatch chat itself remains a single continuous thread, but individual tasks can be routed to different Cowork projects depending on what you specify in your prompt.

Skills sit on a separate layer entirely. They're installed account-wide, so there's no risk of Dispatch not being able to access the skill.

A 🐛

There's a bug to flag before relying on Dispatch (some things are too good to be true).

Some tasks complete successfully, including ones that create an artifact, a PNG, or a PDF, but the finished output never appears on your phone. Go back to the Cowork desktop app, though, and the file is sitting right there. It was created; it just never revealed itself in the chat.

This matches a pattern other people have reported independently. And like others, I’m frankly a bit furious. But Dispatch is still in beta, and betas drop things sometimes. What it gets right, even now, is the premise: send a real task from your phone and get back a real file, a real slide, or a completed skill run, with no transcript to interpret yourself. Name your project when you send a task, watch what you allow in the browser, and check the desktop directly before assuming nothing happened.