Anthropic Launches Claude Duet, a Proactive AI Agent

Anthropic introduced Claude Duet today. It is the company's answer to Meta's Muse agent and OpenAI's Dots agent. Like Muse and Dots, Claude Duet is an AI agent that can reach out to people before they ask for help.

Claude Duet connects to your apps and points out things that need your attention. It can do tasks for you and work in the cloud without needing access to your computer. Like Muse and Dots, Duet has a virtual computer with its own web browser that it uses to carry out tasks.

Anthropic says it designed Duet for professionals and small business owners who have too many things to keep track of. These people are the most likely to find it useful.

Duet is powered by Opus 5.5. Every morning, it sends a short report about important things in your connected apps. It then checks those apps every few hours and sends an alert when something needs attention. It can handle simple office tasks as well as harder jobs, such as building web apps. Duet can work on its own, but it will ask for the user's approval before doing things like sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting a file.

Duet uses the memory, skills, and connected apps already set up in a Claude account, so users do not need to do much to get started. All interactions take place in one ongoing conversation instead of being spread across several different conversations.

Claude Duet cannot see passwords or login details when it gets access to accounts. It also has a special system that checks messages for safety and helps prevent sensitive information from being exposed.

Claude Duet is a separate product that is currently available as a research preview. People can request access by joining a waitlist. For now, it is limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the United States. Users can access it on the web or through a separate Duet app for iOS. Duet uses the existing usage limits of a user's Claude plan, and its background checks count toward those limits.