Anthropic enters the agent race

Anthropic announced Claude Duet on Wednesday as a research preview. The proactive agent matches Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots, completing tasks and sending daily briefings from connected apps.

“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.”

What Duet can do for you

Each day Duet generates a briefing with action items from your connected apps. It handles simple tasks like scheduling meetings and complex ones like building dashboards, creating forecasts, and prototyping web 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.”

How Duet runs and who gets it

Duet runs on Opus five point five and works on standalone Android and iOS apps without needing a Claude session open. The twenty dollar per month Pro plan will get access at general availability.

Managing limits and protecting data

Duet checks connected accounts every few hours to avoid using up rate limits.Anthropic says Duet never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens, and health or financial information only passes through if you explicitly allow it.

“Duet checks your connected accounts every few hours, because checking nonstop would use up your plan's limits much faster.”

The trust question remains

How much value users get from Duet depends on how much they trust Anthropic with their digital life. Sharing entire digital context with an AI agent is too much for some people to accept.

“Context is everything to AI models, and for some, sharing their entire digital life with an AI agent, is just too much to ask.”