Claude Duet: Anthropic's always-on agent app explained

The agent market has moved fast. In August, SpaceXAI opened the Grok Bot beta. In September, Meta released Muse and OpenAI followed with Dots. All three are betting on assistants that act on a user's behalf. Anthropic has now answered with Claude Duet, a standalone app built on Claude Opus 5.5 that runs as a proactive background agent for professionals and small business owners.

The pitch reverses how most AI apps work. In the regular Claude app, you open a chat and ask. Duet comes to you instead: every morning it sends a short summary of the most important items from your connected apps, then only reaches out when something needs attention or approval. Anthropic says it is aimed at people with "more on their plates than they can track," and it pulls memory, skills and app connections from your existing Claude account.

What Claude Duet can and cannot do

Duet can build daily briefings, create dashboards, draft financial forecasts, chase unpaid invoices with payment reminders, get payroll ready, and build prototypes or web apps. You give it tasks by text or voice in one ongoing thread, and it works on its own cloud computer with a browser, so your laptop or phone does not need to stay on. It connects to Gmail, Slack, Stripe, Docusign and Shopify, among others, through more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace. It can make purchases through Stripe's Link wallet or Shopify's Shop Pay; with Stripe Link it uses a virtual card, so your real card number is never shared.

There are limits. Duet will not trade securities or move money between accounts, even with your approval. Anthropic says it is weaker at personal errands such as booking tickets, because it is built for work, and it cannot show its browser use as it happens.

Who can get it: Pro and Max, US only, by waitlist

Duet runs as an app on iOS and Android and on the web at claude.ai. For now it is a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers in the US, who join a waitlist. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet.

One practical catch: Duet checks your connected accounts every few hours, not constantly. Anthropic says constant checking would burn through subscription limits much faster. Duet shares those limits with the other Claude products, and its background checks count against them too.

How the approval step works

On its own, Duet can only read, draft and prepare. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows exactly what it plans to do and waits for your yes. Payments always need your approval.

The rivals take different angles. Meta offers Muse as a personal assistant and a separate small-business version that connects to other apps. OpenAI's Dots leans toward business use through its links to professional tools. Grok Bot is still in beta.

What to check before you connect your accounts

Anthropic says Duet never sees passwords or login tokens directly, because credential handling follows the design of Claude Managed Agents. A new classifier, working with safety instructions in the system prompt, screens every message and by default refuses requests to share credit card numbers or ID details. Health or personal finance information only passes through when you explicitly allow it. Against prompt injection, where hidden instructions in outside content try to steer the agent, Anthropic uses defences from its browser-use research, and red teams and an outside firm ran attack tests on Duet.

Anthropic also says this early version can misread a message thread, misjudge urgency and miss things that arrive between two checks. If you join the preview, connect only the services you need it to watch, read what each connector can do, and keep an eye on its first few briefings before you rely on them.