Anthropic Opens Waitlist for Claude Duet, a Proactive Agent That Briefs Users and Keeps Working in the Background
Claude Duet
Image credit: Anthropic
Anthropic has opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a standalone app in which Claude works as a proactive agent. The preview began on October 21, 2026 and is available through a waitlist for Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the United States. Duet puts Anthropic alongside Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, two personal agents that arrived earlier.
Anthropic describes Duet as an agent that comes to the user with what needs attention, completes tasks it is asked to do, keeps working when the user steps away and checks with the user before it acts on their behalf. The company says it built the product for professionals and small business owners who have more to track than they can manage.
Duet is available as an app for iOS and Android and on claude.ai. Each day, it generates a short briefing with action items drawn from a user's connected apps. Users can also hand it tasks, which Anthropic says range from administrative work such as scheduling meetings to more complex jobs, including building dashboards from dozens of tools, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping and building web apps.
The agent runs on its own virtual machine, so it can finish tasks in the background without a Claude session being open. It is designed to message the user only when something needs attention. Anthropic says it checks connected accounts every few hours, because checking continuously would use up plan limits much faster. Users can set how often Duet messages them and on which topics.
Duet is designed around Claude Opus 5.5, which Anthropic says gives it the judgment to decide what needs the user, what can wait and when to check first. It carries over the memory, skills and connected apps from a user's Claude account, so little setup is needed.
For the research preview, Duet is included in Pro and Max plans and uses the same usage limits as the rest of Claude. Anthropic notes that Duet uses those limits differently from a typical conversation. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet.
Engadget contrasted this with OpenAI's Dots, which are currently limited to OpenAI's Pro tier, where plans start at $100 a month. Claude's Pro plan costs $20 a month.
Anthropic says Duet is an early preview and can still misjudge what is urgent. Reporting on the launch adds that personal errands are less developed and that users cannot yet view the agent's browser. The company says it will keep tuning the product based on what early users report, and that feedback will shape how Duet and the main Claude app work together.
Anthropic says Duet draws on its safety and security work on agents. The agent never directly sees a user's passwords or sign‑in tokens. A new classifier and system prompt are designed to prevent it from leaking sensitive information, and information that may relate to health or personal finances is shared only if the user explicitly tells Duet to share it. The company says important decisions stay with the user.
Anthropic said it would publish more about its safety approach for Duet in the coming days.
Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots are the products Engadget names as comparable. Like OpenAI's agents, Duet is billed as proactive, meaning it surfaces tasks and updates without being prompted.
Duet checks connected accounts every few hours, which is one of the choices Anthropic says it made to protect plan limits, and it lets users set how often and about what it messages them.
The waitlist is open now at Anthropic's Claude Duet product page, and the company says it will email subscribers as soon as the agent is ready for them.
Topics
Sources
Stay informed
Startup news in your inbox
Get important funding rounds, founder stories, and startup updates.
No spam - only important startup updates.
Comments
Text only. No links or images.
No comments yet.
