What is Claude Computer Use? What is a ChatGPT agent?

One of the major drawbacks of early AI chatbots was their limitation to conversational interfaces – but that's now changing. With Claude Computer Use and Cowork , the ChatGPT agent (formerly ChatGPT Operator), and several other tools, you can connect AI chatbots to your active computing environment.

 

These tools use a combination of language models, screenshots, and virtual machines to simulate how humans use computers—essentially controlling the computer (with your permission). While they are still far from fully automated, this is a real first step toward creating accessible, universal AI agents that can operate independently.

Here's what you need to know.

Why are Claude Computer Use and ChatGPT agents important?

AI computer agents like Claude Computer Use and ChatGPT are becoming increasingly prominent, so it's worth exploring what things would be like without AI agents that can use a keyboard and mouse – this could help us see the importance of these advancements.

Beyond its primary chatbot function, most AI chatbot features rely on APIs. These APIs can be built by the chatbot developers themselves, as in the case of ChatGPT Search, or by third-party developers, as in the case of ChatGPT's integration with Photoshop and Booking.com.

 

This is also true for some computer control tools, such as Claude Cowork and OpenClaw . While they are incredibly powerful, super useful, and very interesting, they are limited to using the command line or API calls to interact with your computer and services.

 

For example, you could use Claude Cowork to sort your Downloads folder. It would do a great job, but it uses terminal commands to handle everything. It can't sort email accounts, Amazon order lists, or photo libraries using similar techniques. To extend their functionality, a structured method is needed to handle everything: an API, a scripting language, or a set of terminal commands.

On the other hand, having AI computer agents that can browse any website, use any application, and work with any file would be a huge step forward. For example, you could ask an AI agent to search and compare prices for a trip across different travel services for three different weekends and tell you which one is the cheapest. It could create an itinerary and save the details to Google Docs. Or it could even book a trip for you – although that's far beyond the capabilities that current AI computer agents can be trusted to perform.

How do AI computer agents work?

AI computer agents incorporate several recent advances in artificial intelligence, including multimodal models that can understand more than just text and inference models capable of solving more complex problems.

Here's how they work:

1. They use screenshots to view the computer screen and understand what's happening.
2. They break down complex instructions into a series of logical steps, test them, and correct themselves if things don't work as expected.
3. They can use a virtual mouse and keyboard to navigate the standard user interface within the virtual machine.

This process can be summarized into a simple and repeatable AI workflow:

1. Take a screenshot.
2. The computer decides its next course of action to get closer to its goal.
3. Take action.
4. Take a screenshot.
5. The computer decides its next course of action to get closer to its goal.
6. Take action.
7. Repeat until the goal is achieved.

Of course, things are much more complicated on the inside. AI agents must be trained on fundamental knowledge of human-computer interaction, a technique for accurately counting pixels in screenshots, enabling the AI ​​to know where to move the cursor and click—all of this needs to be developed before any of these things can start working.

AI agents are also being trained on specific platforms such as Uber, OpenTable, and DoorDash so they can work with real-world services "while respecting established norms."

Even a year after their initial announcement, both Claude Computer Use and the ChatGPT agent are still in beta testing—or at least they feel that way. While the basic components of these AI computer agents are gradually taking shape, they are still far from reliable enough for widespread practical use.

 

What can AI computer agents do?

The major breakthrough is that AI computer agents can use computers much like humans – albeit slower and less accurate. Even in demos, they show a lot of potential.

Here are some things that Anthropic and OpenAI have demonstrated their machine learning agents can do from a text prompt:

1. Navigate Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, open browsers and other applications, and navigate and search the web.
2. Fill out forms by retrieving data from spreadsheets, CRM, and various other data sources.
3. Search for information about a sunrise hike on Google, calculate the distance using Google Maps, and create an event on Google Calendar for the required departure time.
4. Create projects and shopping lists within to-do apps.
5. Search for recipes on Allrecipes and add ingredients to your Instacart cart.
6. Download files, combine PDFs, and export images.
7. Solve the online tests
8. Searching for specific customer information in simulated e-commerce management systems.

This is an illustrative example from Claude Computer Use.

But these are just the things they can do right now. The potential for the future is enormous, for example:

1. All the tedious accounting tasks you can imagine, like sending invoices, recording working hours, reconciling accounts, submitting expenses, etc.
2. Work with spreadsheets to retrieve data from various sources.
3. Keep an eye on out-of-stock products on online stores and order them when they become available.
4. Book movie tickets or make restaurant reservations as soon as they open.
5. Check your spam folder to make sure you haven't missed anything important.
6. Communicate with online support staff and chatbots.

To be honest, those were just fleeting ideas. In reality, there are countless ways an AI computer agent could be useful.

How good are AI Computer Agents today?

 

Computer agents are getting better and better. The OSWorld test assesses computer usage in real-world scenarios using common applications. Assistants must navigate applications like Google Drive and Excel using a (virtual) keyboard and mouse, not APIs or the command line. An average person scored 72.4%.

Last year, OpenAI's Computer Using Agent reached 38.1%. In October, Claude reached 62.9% – up from 22% the previous year. And finally, in February 2026, Claude Sonnet 4.6 reached 72.5% – which is "human-level capability in tasks such as navigating complex spreadsheets or filling out multi-step web forms, before aggregating everything across multiple browser tabs."

Of course, humans, with their high level of skill and expertise, are still far superior to automated computer systems. Furthermore, these systems are slower: They pause and think before taking each step and don't act quickly. ChatGPT took about 15 minutes to schedule a haircut appointment; whereas normally it only takes about 30 seconds. Even so, their speed improvement is still impressive.

Could you try Claude Computer Use or ChatGPT Operator?

Both Claude Computer Use and ChatGPT Agent are for the general public.

1. Claude Computer Use can only be used via API. If you have the technical skills, you can run it in a development environment and experiment with it. You can also try Claude Cowork as a backup option.
2. ChatGPT Agent is available for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, but it can only be used via a web browser. The API is also currently in beta testing.