Member-only story
Claude’s Chrome Side Panel Now Acts With Your Logins. Scope It.
On Aug 12 the side panel became a full Cowork session — it clicks and submits with your signed-in sessions. Four limits to set first.
On August 12, Claude’s Chrome side panel stopped being a separate chat window. Anthropic turned it into a full Cowork session that can click links, move between pages, type, and fill out forms using the accounts you’re already signed into in that browser.
That last part is the whole story. The tab isn’t reasoning about a screenshot of your bank. It’s operating your logged-in sessions.
So the move is small and specific: turn it on for one bounded browser chore, keep every approval on, and control which tabs it can see. Keep this front of mind: a browser tab that acts with your credentials is a coworker with your keys. The four limits worth setting are below.
If you’re deciding what to let a browser agent touch, the free field guide I keep (permissions, what to gate, what never to automate) is here: https://ko-fi.com/s/d9c44cb9a5
What actually changed
Until this week, a session you started in the Chrome side panel lived and died there. Its conversation and context didn’t follow you to the desktop app, the web app, or your phone. Now it does: side-panel conversations…
