Anthropic Launches Claude Duet, Its Answer to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots
The proactive AI agent sends a morning brief, watches your apps, and keeps working after you log off. It's in research preview for U.S. Pro and Max subscribers.
Anthropic introduced Claude Duet on Wednesday, a proactive AI agent the company says “reaches out before you ask.”
Duet is Anthropic’s answer to Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots. All three are a new kind of assistant. Instead of waiting for a prompt, they watch your apps and decide when something deserves your attention.
The pitch is aimed at professionals and small-business owners with too much to track. Each morning, Duet sends a short brief on what it thinks needs attention. It checks connected apps every few hours and sends an alert when something needs a decision. It can handle simple administrative tasks or bigger jobs: scheduling meetings, building dashboards and forecasts, drafting follow-up emails, even building web apps.
The work keeps going when you step away. Duet runs on its own virtual machine with its own browser, so it can finish tasks while your computer is off. It pulls in the memory, skills, and connected apps already on a user’s Claude account, and everything happens in one ongoing thread instead of scattered conversations. It is built around Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model.
Guardrails, for now
Duet does not get a free hand. Anthropic says the agent will ask permission before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes a file. It never sees passwords or logins when given access to accounts. A dedicated classifier and a safety system prompt screen each message for sensitive-information leaks.
Anthropic is also upfront about the limits. Duet can misread a thread, misjudge how urgent something is, or miss an update that arrives between check-ins. The company concedes personal errands are a weak spot: for everyday tasks like booking tickets, Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots have the head start.
“We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent,” the company posted on X. “It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.”
A three-way race
Duet arrives about six weeks after Meta launched Muse in September, with OpenAI’s Dots landing the same month. On Meta’s earnings call Wednesday, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the United States and Canada have set up Muse personal agents in a month and a half.
Anthropic’s entry is the most restricted of the three. Duet is launching as a research preview, with access granted through a waitlist. It is limited to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the United States, usable on the web or through a standalone iOS app. Background checks count toward a subscriber’s existing plan limits, and Anthropic says bigger jobs like building a financial model can burn through those limits faster because they take more model turns.
