Claude Duet: Anthropic's agent that pings you before you ask

Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, a standalone app where Claude doesn't wait for a prompt. It comes to you. Each morning it sends a short brief on what matters across your connected apps. After that it checks them every few hours and only messages you when something needs attention. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and brings over your memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account. Everything happens in one ongoing thread, typed or by voice.

It does real work too: scheduling meetings, cross-tool dashboards, sales forecasts, prototypes and even web apps. Tasks run on its own cloud VM with its own browser, so your laptop can be off. Anthropic says it plugs into 6,000+ connectors, including Gmail, Slack, Stripe, QuickBooks and Shopify. Duet can read and draft by itself, but it needs your explicit approval before it sends a message, pays, signs or deletes anything. Some actions are blocked even with approval, like trading securities or moving money between accounts.

It's a research preview, waitlist only, for Pro and Max subscribers in the US. Its background checks count against your normal plan limits. Anthropic admits it can still misread a thread or get urgency wrong. It's positioned against OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse.

Why it matters: the agent race has moved from chatbots you open to assistants that watch your inbox, and trust is now the product.