Anthropic introduces Claude Duet as a proactive AI agent

Anthropic has opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app designed to act as a proactive AI agent rather than waiting for every prompt. The company says Duet is available on iOS, Android and claude.ai, initially for US subscribers on Pro and Max plans through a waitlist. It is built around Claude Opus 5.5 and shares the plan’s existing usage limits.

Duet is meant to monitor connected work apps and decide when something needs a user’s attention. Anthropic says it sends a short morning brief, checks accounts every few hours and can notify users during the day instead of requiring them to ask for updates. Users can also assign tasks, from scheduling meetings to preparing dashboards, financial forecasts, prototypes and web apps. The agent runs in its own virtual machine and browser, so work can continue after someone leaves their phone or laptop.

The preview connects to more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in Anthropic’s Claude Marketplace. Examples listed by the company include Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, LinkedIn, DocuSign, HubSpot, Canva and Shopify. Duet can prepare actions and, with confirmation, make some purchases through Stripe’s Link wallet or Shopify’s Shop Pay. Anthropic says it does not directly see passwords or sign-in tokens. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes something, it asks for approval; trading securities and moving money between accounts are excluded.

The launch matters because it shifts the assistant model from answering a request to working in the background and surfacing priorities. That could reduce routine coordination for professionals and small businesses, but it also makes judgment, permissions and data handling central product questions. Reuters reported the release as Anthropic’s response to a wider race among AI companies to build agents that act on users’ behalf. Anthropic itself warns that this early preview can misread a thread or misjudge urgency, and that personal errands remain weaker. For now, Claude Duet is a limited US research preview, not a generally available autonomous worker.