It moved the mouse
Anthropic gave a model hands this week — it took over my screen and clicked. The thrill wears off fast; what it's allowed to touch is the real question
A model took control of my screen this week and started clicking.
Not a demo of clicking. The actual thing. Anthropic shipped computer use on Tuesday, and the upgraded Sonnet sat there reading my desktop, moving the cursor, filling a field, opening a tab — improvising its way through a task the way a careful, slightly nervous intern would.
I watched it the way you watch someone else drive your car. Impressed. Also gripping the armrest.
For two years now the conversation has happened inside a box. You type, it answers, you copy something out. The box was a wall, and the wall was reassuring. The model could be wrong, but it could only be wrong at you, in text. You were always the one who acted.
That wall just came down. The model doesn't hand me an answer anymore. It reaches past the chat and does the thing.
Which flips the whole question. For two years I cared how smart it was. Watching it hover over a button that submits a form, I suddenly care much more about what it's allowed to touch. Which surfaces it can reach. What it can click without me, and what it can't.
This is the part nobody's excited about yet, because the clicking is the magic trick. But the clicking is the easy part. The hard part is the perimeter — the rules around the hands, the record of what they did, the moment where a human says yes before anything irreversible happens.
Capability is arriving faster than the guardrails for it. It usually does.
I spent twenty-five years deciding who gets to push which button in software. I have a feeling that question is about to become everyone's.