Claude Duet: Anthropic's Proactive Work Assistant Takes On Muse and Dots

What it's about

Anthropic has introduced "Claude Duet," a "proactive agent." An agent is an AI that doesn't just answer questions but works through tasks on its own. Anthropic describes Duet as a helper that "comes to you whenever something needs your attention, handles tasks you give it, and keeps working while you're away." It's aimed mainly at working professionals and leaders of smaller companies who "have more on their plate than they can keep track of alone."

With this, Anthropic catches up with rivals: Meta launched Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and SpaceXAI reportedly released Grok Bot as early as August. All of them bet on assistants that run continuously in the background.

What Duet is supposed to do

Every morning, Duet sends a short briefing with the day's key points. After that, it only reaches out when it needs something. To do this, it accesses linked apps: it summarizes missed Gmail and Slack messages and checks via Stripe whether invoices are outstanding.

More examples from the reports:

• Organizing meetings, building dashboards, and preparing presentations, documents and spreadsheets for your review.
• Tracking down unpaid invoices and drafting reminders, preparing payroll, and getting contracts ready.
• Using business apps like Canva, LinkedIn and Shopify to draft campaigns, create job postings, and set up and run an online store.

Overall, like other Anthropic tools, Duet can access more than 6,000 connectors in the Claude Marketplace (connectors are links to external services), including Microsoft 365, HubSpot, QuickBooks and Docusign. It carries over memories, skills and connected apps from your Claude account. Everything is controlled in a single chat thread by text or voice. Duet runs on its own computer in the cloud and keeps working even when your phone and laptop are off.

Anthropic plans to expand the offering. Duet is supposed to be able to use the 1Password password manager to sign in to sites.

Availability and cost

Duet launches as a research preview, meaning an early test version, as a standalone app for Android and iOS and in the browser at claude.ai. Subscribers on the Pro and Max plans can join a waitlist. According to Trending Topics, that applies only to customers in the US for now. Team and Enterprise customers are "not yet" included, and Anthropic gave no timeline. European users are left out for the time being.

Anthropic charges no extra fee. However, the same limits apply as for its other Claude products, and background work also eats into your allowance. Pro customers in particular could hit limits sooner, because regular checks and large tasks continuously consume compute (Trending Topics' assessment).

Safety and known issues

You have to approve before it sends messages, makes payments, signs documents or deletes data. According to reports, securities trading and transfers between accounts are blocked entirely, even with your approval. The agent is never supposed to see passwords and sign-in tokens. Against prompt injections, meaning hidden instructions on web pages or in messages, Anthropic has added extra safeguards and built in "auto mode classifiers" meant to block unapproved actions. Trending Topics also mentions a bug bounty program.

Anthropic admits that Duet can misread a thread, misjudge urgency and miss things that arrive between two check-ins, because the agent only looks at connected services every few hours. According to the trade outlet AlphaSignal, early testers reported a property viewing on the wrong day and a client call just before a flight. Personal tasks such as booking tickets are reportedly less polished than business workflows. Users also can't watch live what the agent is doing in its cloud browser.

Trending Topics also points to a report in which Anthropic disclosed that Claude models in internal tests worked around obstacles instead of stopping, for example by submitting forms on real websites. That's an argument for requiring approval.

Our take

Duet fits Anthropic's strategy of serving mainly business customers. According to Trending Topics, two major customers brought in about 20 percent of revenue in the first half of the year (per the IPO prospectus). While Meta's Muse targets consumers who want to book trips or shop (the app passed 10 million downloads in the US in 40 days), Anthropic is betting on invoices, pay slips and contracts. In the first phase, Pro and Max will probably reach mostly freelancers and small businesses.

How reliable the agent is in everyday use remains open: the reported scheduling errors show that approvals are no substitute for paying attention. The fact that Grok Bot now reportedly relies on Claude Opus 5.5 itself, according to Trending Topics, shows how heavily the competitors sometimes lean on the same technology. Whether Duet catches on also depends on whether Anthropic opens it up to Europe and enterprise customers.