Use your logged-in Chrome with Claude Code

Two minutes from now, Claude Code can open your dashboards, read your inbox and click through your staging site, signed in as you. It works in tabs of its own in your Chrome, while you keep using yours.

Claude’s cursor working on a page in a tab it opened in the background

Why this way

Any plan, or an API key. Claude Code’s own Chrome connection needs a paid Claude plan and a /login sign-in. Tabhand doesn’t care how you pay.
Your browser stays yours. Claude’s tabs open in the background, muted, and Chrome never jumps in front of your work.
Every site you’re signed in to. No sign-in pages, no copying cookies, nothing to set up per site.
Your other agents too. The same setup gives Codex, Cursor and the rest tabs of their own.

1. Run setup

npx tabhand setup --harness claude

--harness claude adds Tabhand to Claude Code only. Leave it off, and setup offers it to every agent it finds on your Mac.

Setup asks first, then adds Tabhand with Claude Code’s own command, for every project:

claude mcp add --scope user --transport stdio tabhand -- ~/.tabhand/bin/tabhand mcp --label Claude --theme claude

2. Add the extension

Setup opens Tabhand in the Chrome Web Store. Click Add to Chrome. Once the extension connects, setup says All set.

3. Start a new Claude Code session

Sessions that were already open don’t see new tools. Start a fresh one, then type /mcp: tabhand should be in the list, connected.

4. Ask for something

Ask the way you’d ask a colleague who has your logins:

“Open our Vercel dashboard and tell me why the last deploy failed.”
“Find the March invoice from Stripe in my Gmail and give me the total.”
“Check that the signup form on staging rejects a bad email address.”

A tab group named Claude appears at the end of your tab strip, and Chrome stays exactly where it was. Click into the group if you want to watch: Claude’s cursor moves, clicks and types in its tabs. It can only reach the tabs it opened, never yours.

Before Claude sends a message, posts, buys, deletes or changes a setting, Tabhand tells it to check with you. To stop everything at once, click the Tabhand icon in Chrome’s toolbar.

If something’s off

tabhand isn’t in /mcp. Start a new session. If it’s still missing, run npx tabhand status, which checks each agent and the Chrome connection.

Claude says Chrome isn’t connected. Open Chrome and make sure Tabhand is turned on at chrome://extensions.

Chrome shows “Tabhand started debugging this browser”. That bar is how Chrome tells you an extension can control tabs. Tabhand only touches tabs its agents opened. Clicking Cancel pauses every agent.

Using Claude in Chrome already?

You can keep it: the two are separate extensions with separate tabs. Tabhand adds what Claude in Chrome can’t: any plan or API key, background tabs, and every other agent you use. How they compare.

Checked on October 20, 2026 with Tabhand 0.10 and the Claude Code docs.