Claude Duet

Claude Duet is a new app from Anthropic, currently in research preview. In it, Claude works as a proactive agent: it tells you what needs your attention, completes the tasks you hand off, keeps working while you're away, and asks for your confirmation before acting on your behalf. According to Anthropic, it is aimed at professionals and small business owners who have too much going on to keep track of everything.

Key features

• Daily briefing: Every morning it sends a short summary of the most important items across your connected apps.
• Proactive alerts: It watches your connected apps throughout the day and messages you only when something needs your attention. Anthropic says it checks your accounts roughly every few hours, and you can customize which alerts you want and how often you receive them.
• Background task execution: Claude Duet runs on a virtual machine with its own browser, so it doesn't depend on your computer or phone staying on. You just describe a task in a short message, and it decides which apps to use and which steps to take, then notifies you when it's done or when it needs your review.
• Text and voice interaction: You can talk to it by typing or by voice in a single ongoing conversation thread. Everything from a quick reply to a week-long project starts here.
• Carries over your Claude account context: It reuses the memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account, so initial setup takes very little work.
• Extensive connectors: You can use more than 6,000 connectors and plugins from the Claude Marketplace, such as Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, LinkedIn, Docusign, HubSpot, Canva and Shopify.
• Business purchasing: It can shop for your business through Link, Stripe's digital wallet. Duet first confirms the item with you, then Link asks you to approve the spend, and payment is made with a virtual card so your real card number is never exposed. It can also check out at online stores using Shopify's Shop Pay.

Who it's for and use cases

• Professionals and small business owners: people who juggle email, messages, calendars, finances and customer matters at the same time.
• Examples from Anthropic include: spotting a property viewing on the calendar with the wrong date, automatically preparing a briefing before a meeting, noticing that a call was scheduled right next to a flight and proactively offering to reschedule, and processing invoices store by store.
• Tasks range from administrative work such as scheduling meetings to building dashboards that span multiple tools, creating financial or sales forecasts, making prototypes, and developing web apps.

Core strengths

• Good judgment: Anthropic says it is built on Claude Opus 5.5 and judges which things need your attention, which can wait, and when it should ask you first.
• Key actions require your approval: Before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting content, it shows you the action it is about to take and waits for your approval. Actions such as securities trading and transfers between accounts are not allowed even if you approve them. You can also disconnect any app it has access to at any time.
• Security and privacy by design:
  • Credentials are handled using the same design as Claude Managed Agents, so it never directly sees your passwords or login tokens.
  • Actions are reviewed by the auto mode classifier.
  • Defenses are in place against hidden instructions and prompt injection.
  • It has been penetration-tested by red teams and external organizations, and is covered by Anthropic's public bug bounty program.
  • A new dedicated classifier and safety system prompt check every message and refuse to share information at the highest sensitivity level, such as credit card numbers and government ID numbers. Other sensitive information, such as health and personal finance data, is released only when you explicitly instruct it to send it.

Availability and technical requirements

• Standalone iOS and Android apps are available, and you can also use it on claude.ai.
• The research preview is opening through a waitlist, with Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US as the first group.
• During the preview, Duet is included in Pro and Max plans and shares the same usage limits as the rest of Claude.
• You need a Claude account and must connect the apps you want it to work with.

Things to note

• This is an early version and may misread email threads or misjudge how urgent something is.
• Its core features are designed around work scenarios; it performs somewhat less well on personal tasks such as booking tickets, and it currently can't show you what its browser is displaying.
• For now it is a standalone app, separate from the main Claude app.
• Background checks consume your plan's usage allowance, and large tasks such as building financial models or presentations require more model turns and background work, so they use more.
• It is a commercial, closed-source service from Anthropic and cannot be self-hosted.