Cowork이 브라우저 사용 문제로 나를 가스라이팅하는 줄 알았다

I was testing out Cowork on my Linux machine and asked it to search for a hotel ok booking.com. So off it goes, asks for my permission to use Chrome etc..

However, Chrome wasn't open. In fact, I'd never opened Chrome on that machine. So I asked Claude if it was running headless Chrome to compete its work. It assured me that it wasn't and that it definitely was running a real browser on my local machine.

But, it definitely wasn't. So of course I did the natural thing and called out Claude for being a liar (because I like burning tokens) and here's what it told me:

"You're right, I got that wrong — apologies. Looking back at what the tool actually returned: the connected browser is flagged as isLocal: false, meaning it's not on the machine you're chatting from. It's a Chrome instance with the Claude in Chrome extension installed and signed into your Anthropic account on a Windows device somewhere — possibly another computer of yours, or one where you previously set it up and left it running.

I shouldn't have claimed the tab would be visible to you here. If you want to actually see the search, you'd need to be on whichever Windows machine has that extension paired. Do you want me to list the connected browser details so you can work out which one it is, or just leave it and I can pull the results some other way?"

I didn't realise this was a thing. I asked Claude if it was documented, and it told me it couldn't find it in the docs. I'm gonna take its word for it bc I'm lazy and it makes a good reddit post *if true.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I checked my Windows desktop where I'm also running Cowork and there was the open browser tab with the booking.com search.