Guide

How to get Claude to send you a daily news brief on your company and competitors

By Newsprint · Last updated · First published

The short answer

Yes. On any paid Claude plan, a scheduled task in the Claude app can run a news prompt every weekday, and it keeps running while your computer is asleep [1]. You read each run in the app; Anthropic advises against scheduled tasks that send messages on your behalf, so email isn't part of the setup [1][2]. Developers can run the same prompt with claude -p under cron, which needs the computer awake; when we ran it once by hand on Oct. 6, 2026, it returned dated, linked stories but dropped two whose pages it couldn't read.

The two setups as of Oct. 21, 2026
Claude app scheduled taskClaude Code with cron
PlanAny paid plan: Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise [1]Pro or higher; the Free plan has no Claude Code [3]
Lowest pricePro, $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month billed yearly [3]The same Pro plan [3]
Where it runsRemotely, on Anthropic's servers [1][4]On your computer
Computer must be awakeNo, unless the task uses files on your computer [4]Yes
Where the brief arrivesIn the app, under Scheduled [1]In a file your script writes
EmailNot part of the setup; Gmail sends ask for your approval by default [5]Only if you add your own mail tool

Anthropic’s own list of uses for a scheduled task includes tracking “topics, competitors, or industry news on a regular cadence” [1]. If you already pay for Claude, that’s a weekday news brief on your company and competitors without buying another tool. You can set it up two ways: as a scheduled task in the Claude app, or, if you’d rather have the brief written to a file, with Claude Code under cron.

A scheduled task in the Claude app

Scheduled tasks come with every paid Claude plan [1]. As of Oct. 21, 2026, the cheapest is Pro, at $20 a month billed monthly or $17 a month billed yearly [3]. The task runs remotely, so it fires on time even when your computer is asleep or the desktop app is closed [1]. Anthropic moved new Cowork tasks on Pro and Max plans to the cloud on Oct. 6, 2026 [4]. Leave local folders out of it, though, since a task that uses files on your computer needs the desktop app open [4].

  1. Open a new conversation at claude.ai or in the desktop or mobile app. If the message box shows “Chat” and “Cowork,” choose Cowork. If it shows neither, you have the new merged Claude experience, which is rolling out to Pro and Max plans first [1][6].
  2. Paste the prompt from the next section with your names filled in. Its first line sets the schedule.
  3. Answer any questions Claude asks, check the task name, schedule, and instructions it proposes, and click “Schedule” [1]. In classic Cowork you can instead click “Scheduled” in the left sidebar, then “New task,” then “Set up manually,” and pick weekdays [1].
  4. Run the task once on demand from the Scheduled page [1], and open every link and check every date before you rely on it.
  5. Each morning, click “Scheduled” in the left sidebar to read the latest run [1]. Anthropic says Cowork in the cloud sends a notification to your phone when Claude finishes a task [4].

The brief stays in the app. Claude’s Gmail connector can send mail, but by default it asks for your approval before each send [5], and Anthropic’s safety guidance is blunt: “Don’t schedule tasks that access sensitive files, send messages on your behalf, make purchases, or take other actions that are difficult to undo” [2]. The connector can also draft emails [5], so you could ask the task to leave the brief as a draft in your own Gmail. We haven’t tried that.

The prompt

It asks for dated stories from the last 24 hours, a link for each, and a plain “nothing new” on a quiet day. Fill in the brackets.

Every weekday at 7:30 a.m., write my daily news brief.

Company: [Your company]
Competitors: [Competitor 1], [Competitor 2], [Competitor 3]
Industry: [Your industry, in a few words]

Rules:
1. Search the web for news published in the 24 hours before this run. Run separate searches for the company, for each competitor by name, and for the industry.
2. Put today's date or the word "today" in your searches. A search by month alone is too broad.
3. Open every story you plan to include and confirm its publication date on the page. Leave out anything older than 24 hours, and anything with no date you can confirm.
4. If a page will not load, search for the same story at another outlet before you drop it.
5. Write three sections: "[Your company]", "Competitors" (one sub-heading per competitor), and "Industry". Put up to five stories in each section.
6. For each story give the headline, the outlet, the publication date, one or two sentences on what happened and why it matters to [Your company], and the link.
7. If a section has no stories from the last 24 hours, write "Nothing new in the last 24 hours." Do not fill it with older stories.
8. Only give links you opened yourself. Never guess a link.
9. End with a line "Searches run:" that lists the searches you ran.

Rules 2 and 4 weren’t in the version we tested. We added them afterward to target the two ways it missed stories, and we haven’t rerun it with them. Rule 9 shows you what Claude actually searched, which makes a gap easy to spot.

Claude Code on a cron schedule

Claude Code runs without anyone at the keyboard when you pass -p with a prompt [7]. It comes with Pro and higher plans, not Free [3], and because cron is your operating system’s scheduler, the job runs on your own machine.

  1. Install Claude Code and sign in with your claude.ai account. If the job can’t use that login, run claude setup-token. It makes a one-year token tied to your paid plan, which you set as the CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN environment variable [9].
  2. Save the prompt above as ~/news-brief/prompt.txt, and replace its first line with Today is {{TODAY}}. Write my daily news brief. The script fills in the date.
  3. Save this script as ~/news-brief/run.sh and make it executable with chmod +x ~/news-brief/run.sh.
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/news-brief || exit 1
TODAY=$(date +%F)
PROMPT=$(sed "s/{{TODAY}}/$TODAY/" prompt.txt)
claude -p "$PROMPT" \
  --tools WebSearch,WebFetch \
  --allowedTools WebSearch,WebFetch \
  --disallowedTools "mcp__*" \
  --permission-mode dontAsk \
  < /dev/null > "brief-$TODAY.md"

--tools limits Claude’s built-in tools to web search and page fetches, --allowedTools lets those two run without asking, and dontAsk denies anything else that would stop for a prompt [7][8]. --tools doesn’t touch MCP connector tools, so --disallowedTools "mcp__*" removes them all [8]. Keep that flag: the job reads pages anyone could write, and a page with planted instructions could otherwise get Claude to call a connector you’ve already approved. We tested the other flags but added this one after our test. The docs also name --permission-prompts none for a scheduled job with nobody to answer prompts [7], which we didn’t use.

  1. Run ~/news-brief/run.sh once by hand and read the file it writes.
  2. Run crontab -e and add this line, which runs the script at 7:30 a.m. local time, Monday through Friday.
30 7 * * 1-5 $HOME/news-brief/run.sh

Cron starts jobs with a short PATH, so if the job can’t find claude, put its full path in the script (which claude prints it). The computer has to be on and awake at 7:30, or cron skips that morning. Nothing here sends email; getting the file to your inbox is up to you.

If you’d rather not keep a machine awake, Claude Code’s cloud scheduled tasks, formerly called routines, run in Anthropic’s cloud and keep working when your laptop is closed [10]. You create one with /schedule in a Claude Code session or at claude.ai/code/routines [10]. They are a research preview, need GitHub access, and run at most once an hour. A green status on a run only means the session started and exited without an infrastructure error, not that your task worked [10].

What happened when we ran it

We ran the claude -p command once, by hand, at 2:02 a.m. Pacific on Oct. 6, 2026, with Claude Code 2.1.288 and its default model. We didn’t run the script, schedule it with cron, or try a routine. The company was Stripe, the competitors were Adyen and Checkout.com, and the industry was “online payments and payment processing.” We used the prompt above without rules 2 and 4, and the run took 44 seconds, with six web searches and six page fetches.

It came back with two stories, both inside the 24-hour window, and both links worked:

  • Stripe: “Constructor Teams With Stripe to Debut Agentic Checkout Tool,” PYMNTS, Oct. 5.
  • Industry: “Mastercard Will Help Distribute AI Tech Worldwide for Rezolve,” Digital Transactions, Oct. 5.

For Adyen and Checkout.com it wrote “Nothing new in the last 24 hours,” and added that the newest item in Checkout.com’s newsroom was dated Sept. 29, which we checked. It invented no links and slipped in no stale stories. It also listed two stories it had left out because it couldn’t confirm their dates.

Those two were the misses. A TechRadar article on European payment providers building their own network ran at 2:25 a.m. Pacific on Oct. 5, inside the window, but Claude’s fetch tool couldn’t read the article text, so it dropped the story. The page loaded normally when we opened it ourselves. The other, on Stripe stablecoin cards, came from a StreetInsider page that returned a 403 error, and Claude dropped it without looking for the same story at another outlet.

The searches explain why the brief was thin. Claude searched for “Stripe news October 2026” and “Adyen news October 2026,” not for that day, so most of what came back was one to seven days old and the date rule threw it out. That left a single Stripe story.

What’s still yours to handle

Both setups leave delivery to you. A scheduled task’s results sit in your own Claude account and a cron job writes a file on your own machine, so getting the brief to a team means copying it out, approving each Gmail send [5], or building delivery yourself.

Results can also change from one morning to the next, because Claude picks its own searches each run. Ours were by month when we asked for 24 hours, and with a single run we can’t say how much a second would differ. Nor can Claude cover what you didn’t name: each run searches the company, competitors, and industry in your prompt, so a new competitor or a regulator you left out gets in only if the industry search catches it. Anthropic’s advice is to “check the results of scheduled tasks regularly to make sure Claude is performing as expected” [2].

Newsprint takes that part off your hands. It plans coverage from your company’s website rather than a list you typed, and each weekday morning it emails stories an AI editor picked from wire services, national and business press, and your industry’s trade publications, each linked to the original. Nobody keeps a laptop awake or approves a send, you change it by replying, and it’s $300 a month for the whole company. Enter your work email on newsprint.com to start.

What Newsprint does not do

It costs more than the Claude plan you may already have

If you already pay for Claude Pro, at $20 a month billed monthly [3], and you're the only reader, a scheduled task is the cheaper route. Newsprint is $300 a month for the whole company.

No search box and no dashboard

It's one email each weekday morning. There's no search box for your own searches and no coverage report to pull, and you change it, or ask for a brief on a topic, by replying.

It won't alert you as stories break

You can reply to ask for a brief now. Alerts through the day are part of Teams, which is scoped and priced in a conversation.

It can get a story wrong

Newsprint uses AI to pick and summarize stories too, so it can get one wrong. Reply to flag a mistake, though an email that's already gone out can't be pulled back.

It does not open paywalls

Every story links to the original, and if that article sits behind a paywall, you'll need a subscription to read it.

Questions people ask

Can Claude email me my daily news brief automatically?

Not as a built-in option. The Gmail connector can send mail, but by default it asks for your approval before each send [5], and Anthropic's safety guidance says not to schedule tasks that send messages on your behalf [2]. You read each run on the Scheduled page in the app [1].

Does my computer need to be on?

Not for a scheduled task in the Claude app, which runs remotely while your computer sleeps [1], as long as it doesn't use files on your computer [4]. A claude -p job under cron runs on your own machine, so the machine has to be awake. A local Claude Code Desktop task skips a run your computer sleeps through, then runs once to catch up when it wakes [11].

Which Claude plan do I need?

Any paid plan. As of Oct. 21, 2026, the cheapest is Pro, at $20 a month billed monthly or $17 a month billed yearly ($200 up front) [3]. Free doesn't include Claude Code [3].

How do I stop Claude from padding a quiet day with old stories?

Tell it not to. Our prompt said to leave out anything older than 24 hours and to write "Nothing new in the last 24 hours" for an empty section, and in our test Claude did that for both competitors instead of reaching for older news.

Why did Claude miss a story I saw somewhere else?

In our test it dropped stories when a page blocked it or the article text didn't load, and it didn't look for the same story at another outlet. It also searched by month rather than by day. Rules 2 and 4 in the prompt, added after the test, go after both problems.

Is any of this still in beta?

Parts of it. Claude Code's cloud scheduled tasks, formerly called routines, are a research preview [10], Cowork on web and mobile is in beta for Team and Enterprise plans [4], and the new Claude experience that merges chat and Cowork is still rolling out [6].

Sources

  1. Schedule recurring tasks in Claude Cowork. Claude Help Center. Read .
  2. Use Claude Cowork safely. Claude Help Center. Read .
  3. Plans & Pricing. Anthropic. Read .
  4. Use Claude Cowork on web, desktop, and mobile. Claude Help Center. Read .
  5. Use Google Workspace connectors. Claude Help Center. Read .
  6. Claude Cowork and chat are one Claude. Claude Help Center. Read .
  7. Run Claude Code programmatically. Claude Code Docs. Read .
  8. CLI reference. Claude Code Docs. Read .
  9. Authentication. Claude Code Docs. Read .
  10. Automate work with scheduled tasks. Claude Code Docs. Read .
  11. Schedule recurring tasks in Claude Code Desktop. Claude Code Docs. Read .

Skip the cron job

Enter your work email and reply YES. About 15 minutes later your first brief is in your inbox. The first brief is free and needs no credit card. The daily brief is $300 a month for the whole company.