Claude Duet entered research preview on October 21, 2026, when Anthropic opened a new Claude app that no longer waits for you to speak first. It tells you what needs your attention, completes the tasks you hand it, keeps working in the cloud after you step away, and comes back for your consent before it acts in your name. The first wave is limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the United States, admitted in waves from a waitlist; Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet.
Its day starts with a morning brief
Duet is built around Claude Opus 5.5. Each morning it condenses the most important items across your connected apps into a short brief, then checks your accounts every few hours during the day and messages you only when it judges that something needs you. Anthropic says it deliberately avoids nonstop monitoring, because constant checking would burn through plan limits far faster, and background checks count toward the same shared Pro and Max usage. Duet inherits the memory, skills and connected apps of your Claude account and can draw on more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks and Shopify.
Hand it the work, then close the laptop
Everything happens in one ongoing thread, by text or voice: scheduling meetings, building dashboards, preparing financial and sales forecasts, prototyping and building web apps are all on its task list. For small business owners the official examples get concrete, from finding unpaid invoices in QuickBooks and drafting the reminders to preparing payroll in Gusto for your review. Duet runs on a cloud virtual machine with its own browser, so your computer and phone can be off; it notifies you when a task is done or needs review. Products that come to you first are suddenly everywhere, and Meta's Muse drew millions of users with the same pitch of acting and sharing on your behalf.
It can act alone, but some things require asking first
The line is drawn at sensitive actions: before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting anything, Duet must show you exactly what it is about to do and wait for approval. Trading securities and moving money between accounts are off-limits even with approval. It never sees your passwords or logins, and a dedicated classifier is designed to block requests to share credit card numbers, government identification and similar data. Anthropic is candid about the weaknesses: Duet may misjudge urgency, miss something that arrives between checks, and is still not good at personal errands such as booking tickets. The proactive-agent race is now crowded, with OpenAI's always-on Dots launched last month and Meta's Muse surging in downloads; Duet fills Anthropic's slot. What will separate them is not who is most proactive, but who first earns enough trust to be handed the daily workload.
