Anthropic Puts Claude Duet Forward as a Proactive AI Assistant
Anthropic has unveiled Claude Duet, a standalone agent app it describes as a proactive assistant for professionals and small business owners, as OpenAI and Meta race to build software that can finish work without being driven step by step. The app goes further than a chat window. According to Reuters, it watches the apps a user connects and raises items that need attention instead of waiting to be asked.
Duet opens with a daily briefing. It schedules meetings, builds financial forecasts and assembles web apps, and it runs on iOS, Android and the web through a research preview that requires a place on a waiting list. The assistant is built around Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model, and it is open first to subscribers in the United States on the Pro and Max plans, where it shares the usage limits those plans already carry.
And the company is selling it as a change in how an assistant behaves. Duet monitors connected services and surfaces work rather than sitting behind a prompt box, which is the ground OpenAI and Meta have both moved onto with agents that stay running in the background.
OpenAI introduced "dots" agents that pursue a user's goals across apps including Slack and Microsoft Teams. Meta's Muse agent drew millions of downloads and fed investor interest in services that act on their own, which makes the three launches one competition rather than three separate products.
Duet draws on more than 6,000 connectors in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail and Slack, and it can buy things through Stripe's Link wallet and Shopify's Shop Pay. That reach is what turns a briefing into an action. It is also where the risk sits, because a connector that can spend and send carries more weight than one that only reads.
But Anthropic says sensitive actions need the user's approval, and it concedes that the agent can misjudge urgency. The company also says Duet is weaker at personal chores such as booking tickets, a gap that separates a work assistant from a general one.
The launch places Anthropic in a contest with larger rivals that have spent the past year pushing agents from demonstration to product. Each of the three is betting that people will pay for software that starts work unprompted, and each is still working out how much freedom to hand over. Reuters reported no figure for how many people have been let into the preview.
Duet carries no separate price. It uses the limits of the Pro and Max subscriptions, and the preview is open by invitation rather than sign up, so the first wave of users is capped by Anthropic rather than by demand. The company has not said when the preview widens or when the app leaves it.
So the test for Duet is whether its suggestions read as useful rather than noisy. An assistant that interrupts with the wrong task is worse than one that waits to be asked, and Anthropic's own note that the agent can misjudge urgency points at exactly that risk.
For now the app is limited to one market, sits behind a waiting list, and depends on the connectors a user chooses to attach. Anthropic has given no timing for availability in Asia, and no figure for the size of the preview.
Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, a standalone agent app for professionals and small business owners.
It runs on iOS, Android and the web, built around the Opus 5.5 model, and opens with a daily briefing.
Duet connects to more than 6,000 services and can pay through Stripe Link and Shopify Shop Pay.
Anthropic says sensitive actions need approval, and concedes the agent can misjudge urgency.
The preview is open by invitation in the United States, with no separate price and no date for wider release.
Source: Reuters
