Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive agent app

Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet on Wednesday, a standalone agent app for iOS, Android and claude.ai aimed at professionals and small business owners rather than consumers. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5, is included in Pro and Max plans, starts in the US and requires joining a waitlist.

The pitch is a break from chat: Duet comes to the user with what needs attention, keeps working while they are away, and asks before it acts.

What Duet actually does

Each morning Duet sends a short brief on the most important items across connected apps. Through the day it keeps tabs on those apps and messages the user only when something needs attention. Workloads range from scheduling meetings to building dashboards across dozens of tools, financial and sales forecasts, prototyping and shipping small web apps, according to Anthropic's announcement.

Tasks run in a background cloud computer, continuing while the user steps away. The app carries over the memory, skills and connected apps from the existing Claude app and works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins, per the product page.

The race moves from assistants to agents

Duet lands in a suddenly crowded field. TechCrunch puts it against Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots, Grok Bot and Fo, framing Anthropic's angle as professional work rather than errands. Anthropic draws the line itself: Duet is not built for booking tickets, and it does not show browser use live.

That positioning matters commercially. Assistants won the last two years on conversation quality. Agents are judged on whether they can be left alone with a task list and a company's data without causing an incident.

Approvals are the product

Most of Anthropic's announcement is safety engineering, which is the interesting part for anyone shipping agents. Credential handling follows the Claude Managed Agents design, so Duet never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens. Actions are gated by the same auto mode classifier that guards Claude Code, and Anthropic added a dedicated classifier plus safety system prompt that rejects sharing credit card numbers and government identification; health and financial data move only when the user explicitly asked.

TechCrunch reports purchases route through Stripe Link or Shop Pay with user approval, and that Duet will not trade securities or move money between accounts. The preview was red-teamed internally and by an external penetration testing firm and is covered by Anthropic's bug bounty.

What builders should take away

The approval gate is now architecture, not a feature toggle: identity, credentials and permissions get designed first, then the task loop. Duet also mirrors agent commerce, where Walmart opened an agent gateway while Amazon closed its doors and credential brokers like 1Password race to keep passwords out of agent context.

The practical lesson is narrower than the launch hype: a morning brief with a short queue of decisions is becoming the default interface for proactive agents, and any automation team can build that format on its own stack today.