Claude Dispatch has been around for a few months now (since March 2026) and has received a fair bit of press. It’s a genuinely useful tool that covers a myriad of use cases. It is, however, still (June 2026) classed as a Beta / Research project. Note: the current status of Dispatch may differ depending on your Claude plan.
Claude Dispatch, in a nutshell, allows you to ask Claude to perform an action for you in your Claude Desktop application from your phone or tablet. The task will run and complete autonomously, without any further intervention from you. It’s a form of remote control; it’s submitting a job to your Desktop app, using your phone or tablet as the client.
Claude Dispatch is part of Claude Cowork, and it’s primarily available to Pro and Max users, with Team and Enterprise access subject to your plan settings. You do not get access with the free plan. You may have to get your Claude Admin to enable Dispatch within the Admin Settings.
Once this is done, you will see the Dispatch option available in the top-left section after you select the Cowork option from the top of the window.
Selecting the Dispatch option on your desktop app presents you with an option to pair your phone.
Clicking the button presents you with a QR code which you scan using the Claude app on your phone. This makes the connection between your mobile device and the Claude Desktop app.
It seems that once one (iOS) device is connected, then the same goes for your other devices. For example, I scanned the QR code with my iPhone and found that my iPad was also automatically connected to Claude Desktop.
Note that, for obvious reasons, your computer that runs the Desktop application needs to be awake and available with the Claude app running in order for Dispatch to work. The Desktop app actually has settings to ensure that your computer won’t sleep, no need to install anything additional or mess about with your system settings to enable that capability. If your computer was unavailable at the scheduled time the task will run the next time you login to the Claude Desktop application.
It’s worth noting that Claude will prompt you for approval before it accesses any files or tools needed to complete the task you assigned it. It’s also worth noting that as it’s your Desktop app that is being controlled, your Dispatch instructions have access to all your locally installed MCP Servers, Tools and Skills.
Here’s an example to illustrate how it works; however, bear in mind that this functionality has so many use cases that aren’t immediately obvious, and this is a very trivial example.
The scenario for this example is that I am away from my computer (walking the dog, in the pub, at the gym (yeah, right!) etc.) and I realise I need to prepare a document for a meeting first thing tomorrow. This document is a spreadsheet that contains action points based on the minutes from a series of recent meetings I’ve had with the team.
These documents are stored in my ‘Documents’ folder in a subdirectory called ‘Project_X_Minutes’.
The image below shows a screenshot of the conversation on my iPad / iPhone in order to get Claude Desktop to perform that task for me.
As you can see, this is very simple to use and potentially extremely useful.
Here’s the spreadsheet
If you have Claude Cowork, turn on Dispatch and have a play 🙂
Note: This document was written and the testing was carried out on macOS and iOS devices. I’m sure the same can be achieved using Windows and Android devices, but I haven’t yet tested in that scenario, nor have I tested on Linux.