Using Claude as an autonomous file agent

The article explains how to give Claude hands: it reads and edits files on your hard drive, searches bookmarks and document archives, sorts your inbox, clicks through web pages, and processes whole task chains. This can save much work, but if something goes wrong, agentic Claude can cost you valuable information and real money. The chatbot is based on a language model that can hallucinate, and a networked Claude offers attackers new entry points. Through connectors, Claude accesses folders, programs, and web services; behind almost all of them is the open standard MCP. It becomes dangerous when these three capabilities combine via connectors: access to private data, contact with foreign content, and the ability to send something outside. In cowork mode, Claude breaks down a task into steps and works through them, optionally time-controlled and unsupervised. The article describes how to reduce risk by gradually granting Claude more rights: first access to a single directory on the desktop, then connection to other apps and services, and finally acting completely freely. The dangers are explained in detail and how to minimize them.