An always-on agent teammate, decoded

What you see

Sometime in 2026 the chat apps you already had grew a second self. Google’s Gemini Spark, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, SpaceXAI’s Grok Bot and Meta’s Muse each sell a version of the same offer: hand over a task, close the laptop, and the assistant keeps going without you. It takes on a recurring job on a schedule, watches an inbox or a connected app for something worth acting on, and messages you back, sometimes minutes later and sometimes the next morning, with finished work or a question it needs answered first. Two open-source projects, Nous Research’s Hermes Agent and OpenClaw, offer the same shape of product as something you run on your own machine. What you experience across all six is a chat thread that keeps having things to say on days you never opened the app.

What is happening underneath

Nothing here starts because you typed a message. A schedule, a new item in an inbox, or a trigger you set up starts the session instead, in ordinary code, no different from a cron job. What happens once it is running is the model’s to decide: whether anything actually needs doing, and what to do about it. That is always-on assistants, level 7 for exactly that reason. A scheduled reminder where you pick the time and the model writes one answer is not this; the level turns on the session running to a conclusion, unattended, with the model choosing every step in between. Google lists “Set recurring tasks or triggers”[1] among the things you can hand Spark, and describes it as “a 24/7 personal AI agent” that “keeps working in the background even when you close your laptop or lock your phone”[1]. Grok Bot’s bots “share a computer of their own in the cloud, so jobs do not stall when you step away”[5].

A single session cannot run forever, so carrying a task from one session to the next is what long-running tasks is about: a written checkpoint outside any one process, not a live connection you left open. Nous Research says its own agent keeps that state across restarts. “Hermes stores conversations, memories, and skills so you can return to your work in a later session.”[8] Its FAQ is equally direct about what running your own copy costs: “Tasks that need an active agent will not run while it is stopped; hosted agents are managed separately in Nous Portal.”[8] OpenClaw takes that trade further: its README says “State, memory, and credentials live on your hardware”[9] and that the project “has no paid tier, hosted service, or token”[9].

Some of these assistants act on a real interface instead of calling a fixed API. Meta documents that for Muse, which runs on “a dedicated secure computer with its own browser”[6] and “can open a browser, fill out forms, and negotiate on their behalf”[6]. Meta does not document what happens inside that loop. Computer use is the page that explains the mechanism any product needs to drive a screen: a screenshot, one action, a new screenshot, repeated until the task is done or something needs a person.

None of the four subscription products lets the model spend money or send something irreversible purely on its own say-so. Human approval is the base version of that gate, where code decides when to pause rather than the model, and each of the four documents some version of it. Grok Bot’s bots “finish jobs end to end, and only come back when something needs your approval”[5]. Muse “checks with the person before sensitive actions like sending an email or making a purchase”[6].

Which page explains each part

What the makers say

Google describes Spark’s approval behavior as part of the product rather than a setting you have to find: “Spark operates under your direction. You choose whether to turn it on and what apps it connects to, and it’s designed to ask you first before performing high-stakes actions like spending money or sending emails”[1].

Anthropic’s release notes date the shift from a desktop tool to an always-on one precisely. The entry for January 12, 2026 introduces Cowork as a research preview on Claude Desktop, macOS only, for Max plans, and says it “runs locally on your computer in an isolated VM”[3]. A person starts every session on their own machine there, so this site places that release at level 5, not level 7. The entry for July 7, 2026 is what moves it: “Cowork runs your sessions remotely (in beta), so your sessions and files are saved to your Claude account and go where you go, on any device. Work continues when you close your laptop, and scheduled tasks run with no device online”[3], rolling out first on the Max plan. On September 16, 2026 Anthropic folded the product back into Claude itself: “Claude Cowork and chat are merging into one Claude”[4], on Pro and Max plans.

Meta documents a second system checking the first, rather than the same model checking itself: “A separate Sentinel agent runs on that same machine, kept apart from Muse at the system level. Nothing Muse does reaches the internet unless the Sentinel approves it, and it asks the person for permission when needed.”[6]

Where it fails

The always-on part arrives in pieces, and each maker says which piece is missing. Grok Bot launched in beta for named SuperGrok and Cursor plans on desktop and iOS, with enterprise access still a waitlist[5]. Google’s June 2026 update scopes the Spark desktop app to “Beta to Google AI Ultra subscribers aged 18 and over, starting in the US”[2], and puts the part that would run a task on your own machine while you are away in the future tense: “coming soon, you’ll even be able to run tasks remotely”[2]. Meta does the same with Muse’s strongest privacy claim. A Muse Confidential VM, in which “the whole VM, including a person’s data and conversations with Muse, is encrypted with a key only they hold, so not even Meta can access it”[6], is something Meta says it will introduce “Later this year”[6]. For the two projects you run yourself the gap is different in kind: a stopped agent runs nothing[8], so the always-on property is your own uptime.

If you build one

Decide what a login can reach, and for how long, before you hand one over. Meta’s design puts that answer in the credential layer rather than trusting the model to behave around a live password: “Muse has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods. Any credentials a person shares go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them”[6]. A vault the assistant can use without reading is worth looking for in anything you connect a real account to.

Treat the approval queue as part of the product rather than a formality. It is the one place you actually supervise unattended work, so it has to show enough for a person to judge, not a bare yes or no, which is what the failure modes on the human approval page describe. Write the split itself in code up front: run it automatically, hold it for approval, or never run it at all. That is what the example on the always-on assistants page does, and it is the one part of the system a prompt is the wrong place for.

One question separates a genuinely always-on product from a scheduled chatbot: does it keep running with no device of yours online? Claude Cowork is the clearest test case, because by Anthropic’s own account the same product went from a person starting every session on a Mac in January to sessions that “go where you go, on any device”[3] in July. A demo that shows a session starting when you open the app has not answered it.