Anthropic today introduced Claude Duet, its answer to Meta's Muse agent and OpenAI's Dots agent. Like Dots and Muse, it is a proactive agent that "reaches out before you ask."
Claude Duet connects to your apps and suggests things that need your attention. It completes tasks and can work in the cloud without local access to a computer. As with Muse and Dots, Duet has a virtual machine with its own browser to complete tasks.
Anthropic says it built Duet for professionals and small business owners with too much to track, as those are the people most likely to find it helpful.
Duet is built around Opus 5.5. It sends a short brief each morning on important items from connected apps, then checks apps every few hours and sends an alert when something needs attention. It can complete simple administrative tasks or more complex tasks like building web apps. While the agent works on its own, it will get user approval before it takes actions like sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting a file.
It incorporates memory, skills, and connected apps from a Claude account, so there isn't much setup involved. Interactions happen in one ongoing thread instead of across different conversations.
Claude Duet does not see passwords or logins when given access to accounts, and it has a dedicated classifier and safety system prompt that checks each message and guards against sensitive information leaks.
Claude Duet is a standalone product that's available in a research preview right now with access granted via waitlist. It's limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the United States, and can be used via the web or a standalone Duet iOS app. Duet uses your existing Claude plan limits, and its background checks will count toward them.
