Anthropic made Claude Cowork Projects cloud-only by default

Claude Cowork Projects now default to running in the cloud, cutting off local filesystem access for people who built workflows around local folders. A Reddit thread on r/ClaudeAI with 159 upvotes documents the switch. Existing local-folder projects lost access, and new projects can no longer be created with persistent local folders at all. A "Run on computer only" toggle restores local access for projects that already had it, but it's barely documented, and it doesn't fix the deeper problem, since local-folder creation is gone entirely.

The change caught users mid-migration. One non-coding user in the thread said they'd moved from Google Antigravity to Cowork specifically for multi-folder local access, and now can't recreate that setup. The thread's auto-generated mod summary, posted after 50 comments, recorded broad agreement that the break is real and widespread, not an isolated complaint.

Anthropic hasn't published release notes explaining the switch or a timeline for restoring local-folder project creation. That gap matters: a default change that removes a capability with no migration path is a breaking change, whatever the changelog eventually calls it.

My bet: Anthropic restores local-folder project creation within weeks. Cowork's pitch depended on treating local codebases as first-class, and cloud-only breaks that for anyone who doesn't want to upload an entire repo just to keep working. Watch whether the fix arrives as a documented changelog entry or shows up with no explanation at all, given how this rollout went.