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Anthropic's new session management feature lets users filter, view, and switch between local and cloud environments from a single sidebar.
Managing multiple AI work sessions used to mean keeping careful mental track of what was running where. Anthropic just made that considerably less painful.
Claude Desktop now includes a dedicated sessions hub, giving users a unified view of every active session regardless of whether it’s running on their local machine or on Anthropic’s remote servers.
What the sessions hub actually does #
The new interface surfaces inside the Claude Desktop sidebar, where users can filter their sessions by environment: Local or Cloud.
Local sessions run directly on the user’s machine, which means the desktop application needs to stay open for those sessions to keep accessing device resources. Close the app, and the local session s.
Cloud sessions behave differently. They run on Anthropic’s servers and persist even after the application is closed, so an ongoing task doesn’t evaporate just because a laptop lid comes down.
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The cloud session functionality is currently in beta and available to users on paid plans: Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise tiers. The rollout has moved progressively through August and September 2026.
One constraint worth knowing upfront: users cannot flip between local and cloud execution mid-session. Switching environments requires starting a fresh session.
Why hybrid session management matters now #
Claude Cowork and Code sessions, which are the primary use cases for the new management layer, are gated to paid plans. Beta feature availability also varies somewhat between the web client and mobile, so the experience isn’t fully uniform across surfaces yet.
The rollout timeline, stretching across late summer into fall 2026, suggests Anthropic is treating this as an iterative release rather than a one-time drop. Cloud session defaults appear to be getting more prominent in recent documentation.
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