On October 21 Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a separate app in which Claude doesn’t wait to be asked. It comes to you instead. There are builds for iOS and Android plus a version on claude.ai, and for now it’s limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the US, behind a waitlist.
What Claude Duet does during the day
Each morning Duet sends you a short brief on what has become important across your connected apps. After that it checks in every few hours and messages you only when something needs you. Not constantly, and that’s deliberate: every one of those background checks counts against your usage limit.
Tasks come in two sizes. Moving a meeting is one. Building a dashboard out of dozens of tools, running a sales forecast, standing up a prototype or writing a web app is the other. It all happens in one running thread, typed or spoken.
Duet is built around Claude Opus 5.5. Your memory, skills and connectors carry over from the Claude account you already have, so setup is short.
Its own virtual machine, its own browser
Duet runs on a VM with a browser of its own. Your laptop or phone doesn’t have to be awake for work to continue. You describe the task in a short message, Duet works out which apps it needs, and it pings you when the job is done or when it wants something from you.
For tooling it has the 6,000-plus connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace. Anthropic’s examples: find unpaid invoices in QuickBooks or Stripe and draft the reminders, prepare payroll in Gusto, send agreements for signature through Docusign, set up a Shopify storefront. It can buy things through Link, Stripe’s wallet, paying with a virtual card so your real number never travels.
Where the line sits
Reading, drafting and preparing, Duet handles on its own. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you the exact step and waits. Trading securities and moving money between accounts are off the table even with your approval.
There’s also a new classifier that checks every message for leaks. Credit card numbers and government ID never pass. Health or personal finance data passes only when you explicitly told it to send that. The defenses against hidden instructions come out of Anthropic’s browser-use research, and approvals run through the same auto mode classifier that guards Claude Code.
The difference is who speaks first
Agents that work through a task list have been around for two years. Duet flips the direction: it reads along and then addresses you. That’s exactly what it will be judged on, because an assistant that pings too often gets muted, and one that pings too rarely might as well have been a chat window. Anthropic says outright that it can still misjudge urgency and that it can’t show you its browser yet. Hence research preview rather than launch.