Anthropic introduced Claude Duet on Wednesday, a standalone proactive agent app built around Claude Opus 5.5 and aimed at professionals and small-business owners. It is Anthropic's answer to OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse: instead of waiting for a prompt, Duet monitors connected apps and reaches out when something needs attention.

Duet sends a short morning brief drawn from connected apps, checks them again every few hours, and can handle tasks from scheduling meetings to building financial forecasts and web apps. It runs on its own cloud virtual machine with a browser, carries over a user's Claude memory, skills and connectors — more than 6,000 in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail and Slack — and asks for approval before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting a file. For purchases, Duet confirms the item with the user first: it pays through Stripe's Link wallet, which approves the spend and pays with a virtual card so the real card number is not shared, and it can check out at online stores via Shopify's Shop Pay. Anthropic acknowledges it can still misjudge urgency and is weaker at personal tasks such as booking tickets.

Duet is opening as a waitlisted research preview for US subscribers on Claude Pro and Max plans, on iOS, Android and claude.ai. It is included in those plans, but its background work counts toward existing usage limits, so heavy users may hit their caps sooner.