Claude Duet

• Getting a morning rundown of the emails and meetings that need you, with replies already drafted for approval
• Checking QuickBooks or Stripe for unpaid invoices and drafting reminder emails to send after you approve them
• Preparing payroll in Gusto with hours, bonuses and reimbursements filled in for your review
• Pulling together a brief on a company before a meeting from your inbox, calendar and the web
• Building a daily business dashboard from tools such as your point of sale, Shopify, CRM and support inbox
• Preparing an agreement and sending it for signature through Docusign once you approve it

Duet is Anthropic's entry into the persistent personal agent category, and its distinguishing choice is restraint. It checks in every few hours rather than constantly, leads with a morning brief, and puts an explicit approval step in front of anything that leaves your account, with credentials and card numbers kept away from the model. Building on the existing Claude account means people already using Claude connectors get a working agent with almost no setup, and the examples Anthropic leads with (invoices, payroll, contracts, storefronts) make clear it is aimed at small business owners rather than consumers' errands. The costs are access and visibility. It is a US-only waitlist on Pro and Max, background work eats into the same limits as everything else in Claude, Microsoft 365 users are left out for now, and you cannot watch its browser. Treat it as an early preview whose judgment about urgency is still being tuned.

About Claude Duet

Anthropic opened Claude Duet as a research preview on October 21, 2026. It is a standalone app for iOS and Android, also available on the web at claude.ai, and it reverses the usual chat pattern: instead of waiting for you to open a conversation, it comes to you. Each morning it looks across your email and calendar, picks what most needs your attention and can start the first steps, such as drafting replies. During the day it checks your connected accounts at set intervals (every few hours, since constant checking would burn through plan limits) and messages you only when something needs you. You can also hand it tasks by typed or voice message in one ongoing thread, from scheduling a meeting to building a dashboard, a financial forecast or a slide deck, and it works on them in the background on a virtual machine with its own browser, so your phone and laptop can be off. Finished work lands in a Make tab and running work in a Tasks tab. Duet runs on your existing Claude account, so your memory, skills and connectors carry over, and it can use the more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace, with Link by Stripe and Shop Pay for purchases you approve. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and you cannot pick another model. The control model is approval-based: Duet reads, drafts and prepares on its own, but shows you exactly what it will do and waits before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting anything, and some actions (trading securities, moving money between accounts) are blocked even with approval. Anthropic says its credential handling means it never directly sees your passwords or sign-in tokens, and a dedicated classifier is designed to reject requests to share credit card numbers and government IDs. The tradeoffs are those of an early preview: access is by waitlist for US Pro and Max subscribers only, it is not on Team or Enterprise plans, background checks count against the same usage limits as the rest of Claude, you cannot watch or take over its browser, Microsoft 365 is not supported yet, and Anthropic says it may misread a thread or misjudge what is urgent.