How to Use Claude's Computer Use Feature to Automate Your Work
Claude can now see your screen, move your mouse, and type on your keyboard.
April 15, 2026
How to Use Claude’s Computer Use Feature to Automate Your Work
TL;DR: Claude can now see your screen, move your mouse, and type on your keyboard. One command enables it. Tell Claude what to do and it opens apps, browses websites, and runs tasks on your actual computer while you do something else.
There’s a new feature in Claude Code called Computer Use. It’s a research preview, Mac only for now, and it changes how you interact with AI completely.
Before this, Claude lived in the terminal. You could ask it questions, write code, manage files. Useful, but limited to what the command line can do.
Now Claude can control your actual computer. It sees your screen, moves your mouse, clicks buttons, types in text fields, and navigates between apps. You describe a task, Claude does it the way a human would - except faster and without getting distracted.
Setting It Up (2 Minutes)
1. Install Claude Code if you don’t have it: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
2. Enable Computer Use. Open Claude Code and run the enable command. First time, it’ll ask for screen recording and accessibility permissions in System Settings.
3. Grant permissions. Claude needs screen recording to see what’s on your screen and accessibility access to control your mouse and keyboard. Both are in System Settings > Privacy & Security.
4. Test it. Ask Claude to open a browser and go to any website. If it opens Chrome and navigates, you’re set.
What You Can Actually Do With This
The feature just dropped and people are already using it for real business tasks:
LinkedIn Prospecting. Tell Claude to go to LinkedIn, find 10 small businesses in your city that match specific criteria, and pull their names, owner info, and website URLs into a spreadsheet. This task normally takes an intern 2-3 hours. Claude does it in minutes.
Competitor Research. Ask Claude to visit 5 competitor websites, find their pricing pages, and organize all plans, prices, and features into a comparison spreadsheet. No more tab-switching and copy-pasting.
Data Entry. Give Claude a spreadsheet of leads and ask it to visit each website, find contact emails and phone numbers, and fill in the missing fields. The boring work nobody wants to do.
Social Media Research. Tell Claude to find 10 Instagram accounts in a specific niche, note their follower counts, posting frequency, and content types. Research that normally takes an afternoon.
Form Filling. Point Claude at a document with information and a form that needs filling out. It reads the document and fills out the form for each entry.
The Phone Remote Control Angle
This is where it gets interesting. You can text tasks to Claude from your phone using Dispatch, and it executes them on your computer while you’re away from your desk. Go to lunch, text Claude “find me 10 leads in the restaurant industry in Austin,” come back to a spreadsheet on your desktop.
Tips for Getting Good Results
Computer Use is a research preview, so it’s not perfect. A few things that help:
- Be specific about locations and criteria. “Find businesses on LinkedIn” is vague. “Go to LinkedIn, search for restaurants in Toronto with fewer than 50 employees” gives Claude a clear path.
- Break complex tasks into steps. If Claude gets confused, split your prompt into sequential instructions.
- Tell Claude where to save results. “Save to a spreadsheet on my desktop called leads.csv” prevents confusion about where output goes.
- Close unnecessary apps and tabs. Fewer distractions on screen means Claude stays on task.
- Watch the first run. Claude asks for permission before taking actions. Monitor the first time you run any new task type.
What This Means
Every repetitive task you do on a computer - searching, copying, pasting, filling forms, pulling data - is now a task you can describe in a sentence and hand off to Claude. The feature is early and it’ll get better, but even in research preview it’s saving people hours of work that nobody enjoys doing.
FAQ
Is Computer Use available on Windows? Not yet. It’s Mac only as of March 2026. Windows support is expected but no timeline announced.
Does Claude need my passwords to log into websites? Claude can see what’s on your screen, so if you’re already logged into LinkedIn or any other site, it can navigate while logged in. It doesn’t store or request your passwords.
Can Claude mess up my computer? Claude asks for permission before taking actions. You approve or deny each step. It won’t delete files, change settings, or take destructive actions without your explicit approval.
How fast is it compared to doing tasks manually? For structured, repeatable tasks like prospecting or data entry, it’s significantly faster. For one-off creative tasks, you might be faster yourself. The sweet spot is anything you’d normally batch and grind through.
Does this work with any app? Yes. If you can see it on your screen and interact with it using a mouse and keyboard, Claude can too. Browsers, spreadsheets, email, Slack, Figma, anything.