Anthropic is late to the party, but as of today the company has a personal agent to match the likes of Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots. As part of a new “research” preview, the company on Wednesday announced Claude Duet. “It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working even when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf,” Anthropic says of Duet. For now, you’ll need to join a waitlist that’s only open to Claude subscribers in the US to try the new tool.
Like OpenAI, Anthropic is billing Duet as a proactive agent. Each day, it will generate a short briefing with a list of action items from your connected apps. “You can also hand it tasks of all shapes — from simple administrative tasks of scheduling meetings to more complex ones, such as building dashboards with dozens of tools, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping, and building web apps,” the company writes, promising Duet will only message you when something requires your attention.
While Duet runs on Opus 5.5, one of the models Anthropic offers through Claude, the company is releasing standalone Android and iOS apps for people to use Duet. The agent doesn’t require you to have a Claude session open at all times. It runs on its own virtual machine where it can complete tasks in the background.
Notably, Anthropic says subscribers of its $20 per month Pro plan will get access once the agent rolls out in general availability. That sets Duet apart from Dots, which are currently only available to OpenAI’s Pro tier subscribers. Those plans start at $100 per month. Duet shares usage with all your other Claude tools, including Code, which sounds like a recipe for the new agent to blow through your rate limits, but Anthropic at least appears to be thinking ahead.
“Duet checks your connected accounts every few hours, because checking nonstop would use up your plan’s limits much faster. We’re continuing to test its judgment about when to message you, and we’ll keep tuning it based on what testers tell us,” the company says, adding users will be able to set how frequently Duet messages them and in relation to what topics.
On the security side of things, Anthropic says Duet incorporates a new classifier and system prompt designed to prevent it from leaking sensitive information. According to Anthropic, Duet will never directly see your passwords or sign-in tokens, and information that might relate to your health or personal finances is only let through if you explicitly tell Duet to share it. Anthropic said it would have more information about Duet’s safety protections to share in the coming days.
Of course, how much you’ll get out of Duet will depend on just how trusting you are of Anthropic. Context is everything to AI models, and for some, sharing their entire digital life with an AI agent, is just too much to ask.
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