Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
The best AI agent that controls your mouse and keyboard in 2026 is Sai by Simular, because it operates a real desktop end to end (apps, browser, files and terminal) on either a private cloud computer or your own Mac or Windows machine, with the only published cost-per-task figure in the category. Claude's computer use is the strongest choice for everyday tasks on the computer in front of you, ChatGPT Work's Computer Use is the closest equivalent in the OpenAI ecosystem, and UI-TARS Desktop and Agent S3 are the open-source options worth running.
This guide is narrower on purpose than most "AI that controls your computer" roundups. We only include tools that actually move a cursor and type on a real desktop, and we say for each one whether that desktop is yours, a vendor-hosted cloud computer, or both. Browser-only agents, command-line agents and cloud sandboxes that never touch a GUI are covered in a separate section explaining why they are not on the list. Every price, platform and benchmark figure was checked against the vendor's own page or the official OSWorld leaderboard in October 2026.
An AI agent that controls the mouse and keyboard is software that takes a screenshot of a computer screen, decides what to do next using a vision-language model, and then performs the action itself by clicking, scrolling, dragging and typing, exactly as a person would. Because it works from pixels rather than APIs, it can operate any application that has a graphical interface, including legacy desktop software, internal tools and websites that offer no integration at all.
The loop is the same across every product in this guide: observe the screen, reason about the goal, act through the input devices, observe again. What differs is where that loop runs (your machine or a cloud computer), how reliable the model is across hundreds of steps, what safeguards sit between the agent and irreversible actions, and what it costs per completed task.
The term you will see in research papers and benchmarks is "computer use agent" or "GUI agent". If you want the deeper background, see our explainer on what computer use is and how AI agents operate computers.
Most articles blur three very different products together. Sorting them out first will save you a wasted subscription.
1. Agents that control your own desktop. The agent runs on the computer in front of you and drives its real mouse and keyboard (or, on newer macOS builds, a background window). You see what it does, it can use your logged-in apps and files, and it stops when your laptop sleeps. Claude's computer use, ChatGPT Work's Computer Use, Perplexity Personal Computer, UI-TARS Desktop, Agent S3, OpenClaw's computer-use node and Sai in bring-your-own-device mode all work this way.
2. Agents that control a cloud computer. The agent gets its own full Windows or Linux desktop in the cloud. It can run for hours, run several tasks in parallel, and keep working while your machine is closed, but it does not automatically have your local files or sessions. Sai's default mode and Microsoft's Copilot Actions (a separate Windows session on your own PC) fall here.
3. Agents that only control a browser. These drive Chrome tabs through the DOM or screenshots and cannot open a desktop app, a file manager or a terminal. Browser Use, Gemini's Auto Browse in Chrome and the retired ChatGPT Atlas agent mode are examples. They are useful, but they are not mouse-and-keyboard agents in the sense this article covers.
Ask one question of any product: "Can it open Excel, a legacy ERP client or a Finder window and click inside it?" If the answer is no, it belongs in category three.
We judged each tool on five criteria, in this order of weight:
Platform availability and pricing were taken from each vendor's own documentation and pricing page on 10 October 2026. Benchmark figures come from the official OSWorld-Verified leaderboard file published by the OSWorld team or from the vendor's own report, and we label which is which. Nothing in this article is sponsored.
Pricing: Explore plan free with daily credits; Pay as you go $50/month for 50,000 credits; Sai Unlimited $500/month; Enterprise custom. Platforms: Cloud computer (Windows or Linux) or your own Mac or Windows machine. What it controls: Desktop apps, browsers, file systems and terminals on a full operating system.
Sai is built around a simple premise: give the agent a computer, not a browser tab. You describe a task in plain language, and Sai works through it by clicking and typing across whichever applications the job needs, whether that is a web portal, a desktop accounting client, a spreadsheet and a folder of PDFs in one run. It combines OS accessibility data with visual grounding, so it can find a button by its label when the screen offers one and fall back to pixels when it does not.
The deployment choice is what separates Sai from the desktop-only tools below. By default Sai runs on its own cloud virtual machine, so a task does not need your laptop open; on the $50 plan you can run up to five cloud computers at once, billed only while they run. If the task needs your local files or logged-in sessions, switch to bring-your-own-device mode and Sai operates your Mac or Windows machine instead, with only AI usage counted against your credits. For teams this is the difference between "an assistant I supervise" and "a worker I hand things to". The same engine is exposed to developers through the Sai API and MCP server, so a coding agent like Claude Code or Cursor can delegate GUI steps to it.
Reliability and cost are where Simular publishes numbers nobody else in this list does. On OSWorld 2.1, the long-horizon version of the standard computer-use benchmark, Simular reports Sai at a 77.3% partial score (79.4% counting repeated runs) at $14.34 per task, which it describes as on par with Claude Opus 5 at 77.67% and at a lower cost; the full write-up, trajectories and methodology are public. These are vendor-reported figures rather than an entry on the official OSWorld leaderboard, but they are the only cost-per-task numbers published for any product here, and the underlying Agent S research is independently listed on OSWorld-Verified (see entry 6).
Two design choices matter for unattended use. First, approvals: sign-ins, passwords and phone verifications are routed back to you as an approval step rather than handled by the agent. Second, replay: once Sai has worked out a procedure, it can run it again on a schedule or trigger without re-reasoning every step, until the interface changes and it needs to adapt. That is what makes Sai a fit for jobs like downloading bank statements every month, filling the same online forms from a spreadsheet, or turning a written runbook into a scheduled job.
Teams and individuals who want to hand off multi-app work, especially recurring tasks and legacy software, and have it run without supervision.
Pricing: Requires Claude Pro ($20/month, or $17/month billed annually) or Max (from $100/month). Not available on Team or Enterprise plans at the time of writing. Platforms: macOS and Windows desktop app; background mode on macOS 15 or later. What it controls: Your own desktop, apps and browser via screenshots.
Anthropic shipped computer use in the Claude desktop app in March 2026, first on macOS and then Windows, and in September 2026 added a background mode on Mac so Claude can work in windows behind the one you are using without taking over your pointer. Turn it on under Settings, grant Accessibility and Screen Recording permissions, and Claude can open apps, click, type and navigate the screen to finish a task you describe. Claude Code in the terminal can use the same capability on macOS.
The appeal is that it is already inside a tool millions of people use, and the underlying models are strong at this kind of work: on the official OSWorld-Verified leaderboard, Anthropic's own model entries sit near the top, with claude-fable-5 at 85.96% and claude-opus-5 at 83.39% as of August 2026. Note that these are model scores in a harness built for the benchmark, not measured results for the consumer desktop feature.
The constraints are the ones you would expect from an agent that shares your machine. Your computer has to stay awake with the app open, only one computer-use session can run at a time, other apps are hidden while Claude works unless you are on macOS background mode, and categories like trading and crypto apps are blocked by default. Anthropic is explicit that there is no sandbox between Claude and your applications, which is why it recommends the feature for tasks you would be comfortable watching.
Individual Claude subscribers who want to delegate short, supervised tasks on their own Mac or PC.
Pricing: ChatGPT Plus $20/month; Pro tiers at $100, $200 and $500/month. OpenAI's documentation says Computer Use is available with ChatGPT Work and Codex but does not state which plan tier unlocks it. Platforms: macOS and Windows desktop app. What it controls: Your own desktop GUI; background execution on macOS only.
OpenAI's computer-control story changed completely in 2026. The cloud-browser "ChatGPT agent" (formerly Operator) has been retired, and the Atlas browser's agent mode was scheduled to stop working on 9 August 2026. What replaced them is Computer Use inside ChatGPT Work, launched in July 2026: the ChatGPT desktop app can now see and operate graphical interfaces on your Mac or PC, clicking, typing and navigating apps on your behalf.
On macOS it can run a scoped task in the background, and it can even temporarily unlock the Mac to continue a task, which OpenAI describes as intentionally narrow. On Windows the implementation is more limited: the agent moves the pointer and types in the foreground, so you cannot keep using the same session while it works, and the device has to stay unlocked and online. It will not automate terminal apps or ChatGPT itself, and it cannot approve admin or security prompts.
If your organisation already standardised on ChatGPT, this is the natural way to get desktop control. For reliability, OpenAI's current consumer pages cite no OSWorld figures; the older computer-use-preview model scored 31.4% on OSWorld-Verified in July 2025, and Google's May 2026 model card lists GPT-5.5 at 78.7%, so the underlying capability has improved substantially, but there is no measured number for the product feature itself.
Mac users on a ChatGPT plan who want background app control without adding another subscription.
Pricing: Perplexity Pro $20/month or Max $200/month ($2,000/year). Platforms: macOS 15 Sequoia or later only; Mac mini recommended for always-on use. What it controls: Local files, native Mac apps and the Comet browser.
Perplexity sells two things under the "Computer" name. Perplexity Computer, launched in February 2026, is a cloud digital worker that runs each task in an isolated environment with its own file system and browser. Personal Computer, released in April 2026 and opened to all Mac users in May, is the one that belongs in this list: a Mac app that operates Mail, Finder, Slack and other native apps directly, works in the background, takes voice input and can be driven remotely from your iPhone.
The strength is the combination of Perplexity's research engine with local action: ask it to find the three most recent invoices, pull the totals into Numbers and draft the email, and it works across the apps involved. Perplexity's own pages describe operating native apps and on-device authorisation for sensitive steps, though they do not spell out the mouse-and-keyboard mechanics the way Anthropic and ByteDance do.
The limitation is platform: Mac only, macOS 15 or later, with no Windows version documented. Browsing goes through Perplexity's separate Comet browser rather than your default one, and there is no published benchmark.
Mac-based knowledge workers who already pay for Perplexity and want it to act, not just answer.
Pricing: Free, Apache-2.0; you supply model API keys. Platforms: Windows and macOS desktop app; local and remote computer operators plus browser operators. What it controls: Precise mouse and keyboard control of your local computer from screenshots.
UI-TARS Desktop is the most direct open-source answer to "I want an AI that controls my mouse and keyboard and I want to see how it does it." It is a native GUI agent app: it takes screenshots, recognises UI elements visually, and issues real clicks and keystrokes on Windows or macOS. The same repository ships Agent TARS, a browser-focused agent with DOM, GUI and hybrid control plus MCP support, and remote operators that let the agent drive a computer or browser hosted elsewhere.
Reliability is well documented because UI-TARS is also a model family. The UI-TARS-2 technical report (September 2025) lists 47.5 on OSWorld, and the official OSWorld-Verified leaderboard records UI-TARS-2-2509 at 53.1% in the 100-step setting (October 2025). That is well behind the frontier closed models but ahead of most open alternatives, and the repository has 39.2k GitHub stars as of October 2026.
Be aware that it is a configurable agent stack, not a turnkey subscription. The setup guide specifies a single-monitor configuration, the project's news feed has been quiet since November 2025, and there are several hundred open issues, so budget time for tinkering.
Developers and enthusiasts who want an open-source desktop agent they can read, modify and run locally.
Pricing: Free, Apache-2.0; you supply model API keys (Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter or vLLM). Platforms: Linux, macOS and Windows; single-monitor setups. What it controls: The local desktop GUI via screenshots and generated input actions; optional code execution on the host.
Agent S3 is the open-source research framework behind Sai, and it is the entry on this list with the most transparent track record. On the official OSWorld-Verified leaderboard, Agent S3 is listed at 69.9% with GPT-5 and Behavior Best-of-N (October 2025) and at 72.58% with Claude Opus 4.5 plus GPT-5 and Behavior Best-of-N (December 2025), the point at which it passed the benchmark's 72.36% human baseline. A single rollout without best-of-N reaches 67.46%. The paper was accepted to TMLR 2026 and the repository has 12.2k stars.
Architecturally it is a generalist agent that observes the screen and emits pyautogui-style actions, with a modular grounding model (UI-TARS-1.5-7B is the recommended default) and a code agent that can run Python or Bash when a task is better solved in code than in clicks. That hybrid is a big part of why it scores well, and it is also why the README warns that the code agent runs with the same permissions as you and should only be used in trusted environments.
Choose Agent S3 if you want to build or study a desktop agent rather than buy one. If you want the same capability as a managed product with cloud computers, approvals and scheduling, that is what Sai is.
Researchers and agent builders who want a leading open framework to extend or benchmark against.
Platforms: Windows 11 only. What it controls: Apps and files inside a separate Windows session called the agent workspace.
Copilot Actions is Microsoft's answer to the question "can Windows itself run an agent?" It is described by Microsoft as an AI agent that completes tasks by interacting with your apps and files, using vision and reasoning to click, type and scroll like a person. The distinctive design decision is isolation: the agent runs under its own agent account in a separate Windows session with its own desktop, so your desktop stays yours while it works, and its file access is limited to Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Music, Pictures and Videos unless you grant more.
As of October 2026 it is still an experimental Copilot Labs feature that began rolling out to Windows Insiders in November 2025 (worldwide except the EEA), switched off by default under Settings > System > AI components > Agent tools, and admin-only to enable. Microsoft itself says it targets a narrow set of use cases and may struggle with complex interfaces. There is no published benchmark and no general-availability date we could find.
Windows enthusiasts and IT teams who want to evaluate an OS-native agent before it reaches general availability.
Pricing: Free, MIT licence, no paid tier; you supply model keys. Platforms: macOS (Peekaboo or CUA provider); Windows and Linux via an experimental plugin. What it controls: A paired desktop via screenshots and mouse/keyboard input, as an opt-in tool.
OpenClaw is the open-source personal assistant that runs on your own machine and talks to you through WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, iMessage and twenty-odd other channels; at roughly 392k GitHub stars it is one of the most popular projects on GitHub in 2026. Desktop control is not its core, but it does have one: a computer-use node that lets the gateway agent see and control a paired desktop with screenshots and mouse/keyboard input.
On macOS this needs Allow Computer Control, Accessibility and Screen Recording permissions and a vision-capable model. On Windows and Linux the experimental plugin controls only the primary display and lacks some actions (no mouse down/up, hold key, modifier-clicks or drag). It also has no per-action confirmation, and tools run on the host unless you configure sandboxing, so OpenClaw's own docs tell you to treat inbound messages as untrusted input.
If you already run OpenClaw as your messaging-first assistant, enabling the node gives you desktop control from your phone. If you are starting from zero and desktop automation is the goal, one of the dedicated tools above is a shorter path.
Technical users who want a self-hosted assistant and are comfortable configuring tool policy and sandboxing themselves.
Pricing: Standard Gemini API token pricing; Auto Browse in Chrome is for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US. Platforms: Any environment you host; the API returns actions and your code executes them. What it controls: Browser, mobile and desktop agents with OS-level cursor commands.
Google's offering is split. The Gemini API Computer Use capability, built into Gemini 3.5 Flash and documented for the newer Flash models, returns OS-level actions (click, double-click, right-click, drag, type, hotkeys, scroll, screenshot) that your own harness carries out, which makes it a building block rather than a product. Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash model card lists 78.4% on OSWorld-Verified (Google-reported, May 2026), with Gemini 3.1 Pro at 76.2%, which puts it in the same band as the other frontier models.
The consumer-facing piece, Auto Browse in Chrome, is browser-only: it can book, shop and fill forms inside Chrome on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android, pausing before purchases or posts, but it cannot open a desktop app. Google labels Computer Use a Preview that may contain errors and security vulnerabilities, and its prompt-injection detection is off by default. For developers it is a strong, well-priced model to build on; for everyone else it is not yet a desktop agent you can download.
Engineering teams who want to assemble a custom computer-use agent on Google's models.
Every vendor on this list warns about the same risks, and the mitigations are consistent across products.
Prompt injection is the main threat. An agent that reads the screen can be instructed by the screen. A web page, an email or a PDF can contain hidden text telling the agent to send files somewhere or change a setting. Anthropic blocks sensitive app categories by default, Google ships an injection classifier you have to turn on, and Sai routes logins and verifications to you for approval. Whatever you use, do not point an agent at untrusted content while it has access to anything you would not want exfiltrated.
Prefer isolation for unattended work. A cloud computer (Sai) or a separate OS session (Copilot Actions) means a mistake cannot touch your personal files or sessions. If you run an agent on your own machine, give it a dedicated user account, limit folder access, and keep credentials in a password manager it cannot open.
Insist on approval gates for irreversible actions. Payments, sending messages, deleting files and changing account settings should pause for a human. Check whether the tool supports this before you trust it with a real workflow; OpenClaw, for instance, has no per-action confirmation.
Log everything. Screenshots or trajectories of what the agent did are your audit trail and your debugging tool. This is also why vendor-published trajectories matter when you evaluate benchmark claims.
Choose Sai if the work spans several applications, includes software without an API, needs to run on a schedule, or needs to keep running after you close your laptop. It is also the only option with a published cost per task, which matters once a workflow runs hundreds of times a month.
Choose Claude computer use if you already pay for Claude Pro or Max and want to delegate short, supervised tasks on your own Mac or PC.
Choose ChatGPT Work Computer Use if your organisation is standardised on ChatGPT and you mostly work on a Mac, where background execution is supported.
Choose Perplexity Personal Computer if you are on a Mac and your tasks start with research and end in native apps like Mail and Finder.
Choose UI-TARS Desktop or Agent S3 if you want open source, with UI-TARS for a ready-made desktop app and Agent S3 for the stronger benchmark results and a framework to build on.
Choose Copilot Actions if you are a Windows Insider curious about an OS-native agent and can live with experimental status.
Choose OpenClaw or the Gemini API if you are a developer assembling your own stack and are prepared to own sandboxing and approvals yourself.