Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive agent app
A new standalone app built on Opus 5.5 watches your connected tools and acts on its own between check-ins. It is a research preview, waitlisted to US Pro and Max subscribers.
Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet on 21 October, a standalone app, on iOS, Android and claude.ai, where Claude runs as a proactive agent rather than waiting for a prompt. It is built on Claude Opus 5.5 and runs tasks in a virtual machine with its own browser, so it can keep working after you close the app.
Duet sends morning briefs pulled from your connected apps, among more than 6,000 supported connectors including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Shopify and Docusign, and only interrupts you when something actually needs a decision. Anthropic says credentials follow the same design as its Managed Agents API, so Duet never sees your passwords directly, and a separate classifier is meant to block the sharing of the most sensitive data, such as card numbers and government IDs. Access is a waitlist, limited for now to Pro and Max subscribers in the US, and usage counts against your normal Claude limits.
Why it matters: this is Anthropic competing directly with always-on agent products like ChatGPT’s Dots and Meta’s Muse, and it is a live test of how much autonomy people will accept from an agent with broad access to their inbox and business tools. If you are building anything that touches the same connectors, it is worth watching what Duet is and is not allowed to do unprompted.
The caveat: Anthropic says personal tasks such as booking tickets are still underdeveloped in this preview, and the rollout is US-only so far.