Claude Duet: What Anthropic's Proactive AI Agent Actually Does

Claude Duet is Anthropic's new app where Claude works as a proactive agent — it comes to you with what needs your attention instead of waiting for a prompt. Anthropic opened it as a research preview on October 21, 2026, by waitlist, for Pro and Max subscribers in the US. This guide covers exactly what Duet does, how its background work and approvals fit together, who can use it, what it costs, and how it stacks up against Meta Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

What is Claude Duet?

Claude Duet is a standalone app — on iOS, Android, and claude.ai — where Claude acts as a proactive agent rather than a chat window you open. Anthropic sums up the difference in four verbs: it brings you what needs your attention, completes tasks you hand it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.

It's built around Claude Opus 5.5, which Anthropic says gives it the judgment to decide what needs you, what can wait, and when to check in first. Duet is aimed at professionals and small business owners who have more on their plates than they can track.

The key distinction from the regular Claude app: in Claude, you open a chat. In Duet, the agent comes to you.

What Claude Duet does every day

A morning brief. Each morning, Duet sends a short rundown of the most important items across your connected apps. Throughout the day it keeps tabs on those apps and messages you only when something actually needs your attention.

Tasks by message. You hand it work by typing or voice in one ongoing thread — a quick reply and a weeklong project start in the same place. Tasks range from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping, and building web apps.

Background work. Duet runs on its own cloud virtual machine with a browser, so it doesn't need your laptop or phone to be on. You describe a task, it works out which apps to use, and it notifies you when the job is done or needs review.

Check-ins on a schedule. Duet checks your connected accounts every few hours rather than nonstop, because constant checking would burn through your plan's limits much faster. You can tell it what to watch and how often.

How approvals keep you in control

Duet reads, drafts, and prepares work on its own — but before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything, it shows you exactly what it's about to do and waits for your approval.

Some actions are off-limits even with your approval, like trading securities or moving money between accounts. You can also disconnect any app Duet has access to at any time.

On the security side, Anthropic says Duet's credential handling follows its Managed Agents design, so it never directly sees your passwords or sign-in tokens, and a new classifier and safety system prompt check each message to guard against leaks of sensitive information like credit card and government ID numbers. Anthropic says red teams and an external firm penetration-tested the app, which is also covered by its public bug bounty program.

What it connects to

Duet can use the 6,000+ connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace. Anthropic's examples include:

• Finding missed Gmail and Slack messages and helping you reply
• Checking Intuit QuickBooks or Stripe for unpaid invoices and drafting reminders
• Preparing and running payroll in Gusto
• Drafting a job posting and, after you approve, posting it to LinkedIn
• Preparing agreements and sending them for signature through Docusign
• Drafting follow-ups from contact and deal history in HubSpot
• Turning a product launch into a social campaign in Canva
• Setting up and managing a Shopify store

For purchases, Duet can use Link (Stripe's digital wallet) and Shop Pay, paying with a virtual card so your real card number isn't shared — and it confirms the item and spend with you first.

Who can use it, and what it costs

During the research preview, access is limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the US, by waitlist. Team and Enterprise plans aren't included yet.

There's no separate price. Duet shares your existing plan's usage limits — but it spends them differently: background checks count toward your limits, and larger tasks like building a financial model or a deck use more model turns and background work.

Where Claude Duet still falls short

Anthropic is candid that this is an early version. It still might misread a thread or miscalibrate what's urgent. The core is built around work, so personal errands like booking tickets aren't as strong, and it can't yet show you its browser. For now Duet lives in its own app, separate from the main Claude app — how the two come together will depend on what early users report.

Claude Duet vs Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots

Duet lands in a crowded race of proactive personal agents. Meta Muse and OpenAI's Dots chase the same idea: an agent that watches your apps, surfaces what matters, and acts with your approval. The shared pattern across all of them is a background agent on cloud infrastructure, connectors into your tools, and human approval gates before consequential actions.

Duet's distinguishing bet is judgment — leaning on Opus 5.5 to decide when to stay quiet — plus deep ties into the Claude Marketplace and the context (memory, skills, connected apps) carried over from your existing Claude account. The open question, as with every agent in this category, is whether the "only ping when it matters" promise holds up in daily use. For a wider view of the agents fighting to run your workday, see our AI office agents comparison.

Run a proactive agent workforce you control

Claude Duet keeps its agent, its cloud VM, and your connected data on Anthropic's infrastructure. If you'd rather run a proactive, multi-agent workforce locally — with your own approval gates and your data staying on your machine — that's what Eigent's open-source Cowork app is built for: a team of AI agents that monitor, draft, and act on your workflows while you stay in the loop. Download Eigent to put your own agents to work.