Claude Duet is Anthropic's proactive background agent for professionals
Anthropic's Claude Duet monitors your apps, sends daily briefings, and handles tasks without being prompted. Here's what it does and who can access it.
Anthropic announced Claude Duet on 21 October 2026, and it represents a meaningful shift in how the company thinks about what an AI assistant should actually do. Rather than waiting for you to open an app and type something, Claude Duet works in the background, monitors your connected tools, and comes to you with what needs attention.
It is Anthropic’s answer to OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse, and it is built squarely for professionals and small business owners who have more to manage than they can reliably keep track of.
What Claude Duet actually does
The headline feature is a daily briefing. Each morning, Duet surfaces the things across your connected apps that warrant your attention, emails, calendar events, outstanding tasks, and flags anything that has been completed or needs a decision from you.
Beyond the briefing, Duet can take on longer assignments: building dashboards, scheduling meetings, drafting financial forecasts, tracking invoices, and handling a range of web-based tasks. You can hand it work and close your laptop. It runs on a cloud-based virtual machine and keeps going without your device being open. When a task is finished, or when it hits a step that needs your sign-off, it sends you a notification.
The agent integrates with over 6,000 connectors through the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail and Slack. It can also make purchases through Stripe’s Link digital wallet and Shopify’s Shop Pay.
It runs on Claude Opus 5.5, the model Anthropic released on 22 September 2026. That model delivers around a 40% reduction in typical workload costs compared to Opus 5 and output speeds more than 30% faster, which matters for an agent doing background work across long stretches of time.
It asks before it acts
Anthropic has built explicit approval gates into Duet. It will not send a message, make a payment, sign a document, or delete a file without checking with you first. Some actions are blocked entirely, regardless of what you ask: it will not trade securities, and it will not transfer funds between financial accounts.
Credentials are handled using the same approach as Claude Managed Agents, meaning Duet never directly sees your passwords or sign-in tokens.
A new sensitive information classifier sits behind every message Duet processes. It will refuse to share the most sensitive data, things like credit card numbers or government identification, full stop. For other sensitive categories, such as health information or personal finances, it passes them through only when you have explicitly told it to.
Anthropic’s security team ran adversarial tests, red team exercises, and brought in an external firm for penetration testing. Claude Duet is also covered by Anthropic’s public bug bounty programme.
What it does not do (yet)
Duet checks in every few hours rather than monitoring continuously. Anthropic is straightforward about why: more frequent checks would consume your usage allowance faster, and for many workflows the periodic cadence is sufficient. For genuinely time-sensitive monitoring, that is worth factoring in.
Microsoft 365 is not currently supported, which is a gap that will affect a large share of small business users.
Anthropic has acknowledged that Duet is in an early phase. It may misread a thread, misjudge urgency, or miss items between checks. Personal tasks, booking a flight or a dinner reservation, are not a strong suit. Anthropic is explicit that Duet was designed for the workplace.
Team and Enterprise subscribers are not included in the preview, which is an unusual omission given how naturally the feature set maps to business operations.
Who can get access, and what it costs
Claude Duet launched as a research preview on 21 October 2026. Access is currently via waitlist, and only Claude subscribers in the United States can join.
It is included in existing Pro ($20 per month) and Max subscriptions at no additional charge, though it shares usage limits with the rest of what you do in Claude. Background activity counts toward those limits, and complex assignments consume more than a simple chat exchange, so heavy users may find themselves hitting their cap sooner.
Anthropic has confirmed that Pro subscribers will get access once Duet reaches general availability, which puts it in an interesting position relative to Dots, which at launch required OpenAI’s Pro tier at $100 per month.
Dedicated iOS and Android apps are available alongside access through claude.ai on the web.
What this means for you
If you are a professional or small business owner using Claude on the Pro or Max plan, Duet offers something that most AI tools still do not: the ability to delegate work and actually step away. The daily briefing alone, pulling together what matters across email, calendar, and connected apps, is the kind of thing that used to require either a human assistant or a lot of manual checking.
The practical ceiling for now is the checking frequency and the Microsoft 365 gap. If your team runs on Outlook and Teams, you will need to wait for that support to arrive before Duet fits naturally into your workflow.
For everyone else, joining the waitlist costs nothing, and the feature is included in what you already pay. It is worth getting in the queue to see how well the briefing and background task capabilities hold up against your actual workload.