Claude learns to use a computer
Anthropic releases a model that looks at a screen, moves a cursor and types; the assistant becomes an agent, and the year of agents that follows starts here.
what had to happen · 54 events back to 1943
Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. Direct influences are marked.
00 · One neuron · 1
I · Foundations · 9
- 1948A mathematical theory of communication
- 1949Cells that fire together wire together
- 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
- 1958The perceptron learns
- 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
- 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
- 1965Moore's law
- 1969Perceptrons
- 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation
W1 · The first winter · 2
II · Connection · 3
W2 · The second winter · 6
III · Statistics and data · 10
IV · Deep learning · 11
V · Transformers · 9
- 2017Attention is all you need
- 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
- 2018GPT: generative pre-training
- 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
- 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
- 2020GPT-3
- 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback
- 2021Anthropic is founded
- 2021GitHub Copilot writes codedirect
VI · Everyone · 3
- 2022InstructGPT
- 2023Claude
- 2024Claude 3 catches GPT-4direct
On 22 October 2024 Anthropic released an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet with a capability it called computer use, in public beta. Given screenshots, the model could work out where things were on the screen, move a cursor, click, scroll and type, and so operate any software written for people: fill in a form from a spreadsheet, look something up in a browser, run a command. It was slow, made mistakes a person would not, and on the company's own benchmark completed about fifteen percent of the office tasks it was set. It was also the first general-purpose agent from a frontier laboratory that acted rather than advised.
The release framed the next eighteen months. OpenAI's Operator followed in January 2025, Google's Project Mariner and the browser agents of 2025 after it, and the coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, that by 2026 wrote a large share of the world's new software began as this idea applied to a terminal.
Computer use is on this timeline as the point at which the models got hands. The organism on this page, in the final chapters, is wired to tools for the same reason.
what it led to · 5 events downstream, through 2026
Built on it directly:
- 2024The Model Context ProtocolVI
- 2025Claude 4 and Claude CodeVII
And, through them, by era: