Most AI assistants wait for you to type something. Claude Duet flips that around. Anthropic launched it on October 21 as a standalone app on iOS, Android, and claude.ai, and its whole pitch is that it comes to you first: a short brief each morning on what needs your attention, then check-ins through the day when something actually needs a decision.

Duet runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and carries over the memory, skills, and app connections from your existing Claude account, so there is no fresh setup to slog through. It works in its own virtual machine with its own browser, which means a task keeps going after you shut your laptop or put your phone down. You get a ping when the work is done or needs your review.

What it can actually do

The examples Anthropic gives are deliberately unglamorous, and that's a good sign. Duet can spot missed messages in Gmail and Slack and draft replies, check QuickBooks or Stripe for unpaid invoices, prepare payroll in Gusto for review, and get contracts ready for signature in DocuSign. It can also build a brief, a deck, a dashboard, or a simple web app when you hand it the job by text or voice in one ongoing thread.

The connection layer is big: more than 6,000 connectors and plugins through the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, HubSpot, Canva, and DocuSign. It can even spend money for you through Stripe's Link wallet or Shopify's Shop Pay, paying with a virtual card rather than your real card number.

The catch, stated plainly

Here's the part we liked most about the launch: Anthropic is upfront about the limits. Duet asks for your approval before sensitive actions like sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting a file, and a classifier screens for sensitive information leaks. But the company also says the preview can misread a thread, misjudge what's urgent, and miss something that arrives between its checks, which happen every few hours rather than constantly, partly to avoid burning through your usage limits.

Our take: this is the clearest sign yet that the agent race has moved past chatbots. Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots are chasing the same idea, an assistant that works while you're away. Duet's morning brief plus approval gates is the most sensible version of that idea we've seen so far, but right now it's narrow: a waitlisted research preview for US subscribers on Pro and Max only, with Team and Enterprise left out, no extra charge during the preview, and background work counting toward your existing plan limits. If you fit that small group, it's worth joining the waitlist. Everyone else should watch how the preview holds up in real inboxes before handing an agent the keys.