Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive work assistant

What happened: Anthropic introduced Claude Duet on 21 October. It checks connected apps "every few hours rather than continuously" and prepares work for human review, according to The Neuron.

The details: Duet is a research preview with a waitlist, open to US Pro and Max subscribers on dedicated mobile apps or the web. Team and Enterprise plans are excluded.

It runs on Opus 5.5 and can use Claude memory and skills. A cloud virtual machine lets it continue browser tasks when your devices are offline.

The numbers: Duet can reach more than 6,000 Marketplace connectors and plugins, including Gmail, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto and HubSpot. Anthropic has not published usage figures or task-completion rates.

Why it matters: Duet moves from answering prompts to doing groundwork unprompted. You review the output instead of starting the task.

The guardrails: Duet needs approval before sending messages, making payments, signing agreements or deleting documents. Securities trading and transfers between financial accounts are barred even with permission.

Anthropic also describes credential protections, automated checks, prompt-injection defences and sensitive-data filters.

The catch: Reliability in real business workflows is unconfirmed. Anthropic acknowledges Duet can misread conversations or urgency. Users can't yet inspect its browser activity.

Background checks also count against existing plan limits.

The rivals: Meta has Muse for Small Business. OpenAI's Dots is rolling out to Pro and Business Premium users.

What's next: Duet remains waitlist-only for now. Anthropic has not said when Team and Enterprise customers will get access.