Anthropic announced Claude Duet on 21 October 2026, a separate app in research preview built around an assistant that acts on its own initiative. Anthropic describes it as a version of Claude that you message the way you would message a person, by typing or speaking, and that keeps working when you step away.
Day to day, it sends a morning brief, keeps watch over the apps a user has connected, and speaks up only when something needs attention, so the day's brief is a curated summary of the most important items across those apps rather than a feed of every change. Tasks can be handed to it and followed in a dedicated Tasks tab, which shows what is in progress and what needs the user. When a job finishes or needs a decision, Duet posts an update to the main conversation, and only the user can mark a task as done. It runs on its own cloud-based computer, so work continues after the app is closed.
Duet shares memories, skills and connectors with regular Claude, and it can search earlier conversations so users do not have to repeat themselves. A Stripe integration lets it spot unpaid invoices and draft payment reminders, while Link and Shop Pay let it make purchases with the user's approval. Anthropic says it is designed to ask before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything.
It is powered by Claude Opus 5.5 and comes as standalone iOS and Android apps, plus a version on claude.ai for users who receive an invitation. Access is limited for now: it is rolling out to Pro and Max subscribers in the US through a waitlist, with invitations going out in waves. Team and Enterprise plans are not covered yet, though Anthropic says it plans to extend it to them.
Pricing is the one point where the coverage differs. 9to5Mac reports that Duet costs nothing extra but that its usage, background work included, counts toward plan limits, which Anthropic says users could reach sooner than with chat alone. Tech Buzz says Anthropic has not made clear whether it is bundled or priced separately.
Both outlets name the same two rivals, OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse. Tech Buzz reads Duet as aimed at professionals and small-business owners, and contrasts that with Muse, which it calls consumer-first, and Dots, which it calls developer-oriented. That framing is the outlet's own analysis rather than an Anthropic statement.
The same piece also raises open questions rather than answers: how reliably an agent can cope with many edge cases and flaky integrations, and how it will fare as sites such as Yelp and Delta block autonomous agents from other AI companies over scraping and terms-of-service worries. Neither is something Anthropic has addressed in the launch coverage, and the research-preview label leaves room for the product to change before any wider release.
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