Anthropic released Claude Duet as a research preview on October 21. It is a separate app in which Claude works as a proactive agent: instead of waiting for a prompt, it watches the apps you connect, tells you what needs attention and carries out tasks you hand it. Duet is built on Claude Opus 5.5 and is aimed at professionals and small business owners.
How it works
Every morning Duet sends a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps. It then checks those apps every few hours and messages you only when something needs you; you choose what you want to hear about and how often. You talk to it in one ongoing thread, by text or voice, and it carries over the memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account. Tasks range from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, forecasts, prototypes and web apps. Duet runs on its own cloud virtual machine with its own browser, so your phone or laptop does not have to stay on.
Anthropic says Duet can use more than 6,000 connectors and plugins from the Claude Marketplace, naming Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, LinkedIn, DocuSign, HubSpot, Canva and Shopify among them.
What it asks before acting
Duet reads, drafts and prepares work on its own. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you the action, including recipients and content, and waits for approval. Some actions are blocked even with approval: trading securities, moving money between accounts and accessing someone else's account. Purchases go through a one-time virtual card from Stripe's Link, limited to one merchant and amount. In a safety post on October 23, Anthropic says Duet never sees passwords or sign-in tokens, and that checks running outside the model compare each action with your intent and block sharing of card numbers, bank account numbers and government ID numbers.
Availability and limits
Access is through a waitlist, starting with Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US. Duet has standalone iOS and Android apps and also works in claude.ai. There is no separate price: it shares your plan's usage limits, background checks count toward them, and large tasks such as financial models use more. Anthropic lists known weak spots: Duet may misread a thread or misjudge urgency, personal tasks like booking tickets are weaker, and you cannot yet watch its browser.
What this means if you're thinking of trying it
If you run a small business on tools like Gmail, QuickBooks and Slack, the daily brief is the low-risk part to test first. Connect two or three apps and see whether its sense of urgency matches yours before you hand it real tasks.
If you are on Claude Pro ($20 a month) rather than Max, watch your usage: background checks draw on the same limits as your chats. Our Claude card lists the current plans, and ChatGPT vs Claude compares the two main assistants.