Claude Duet: Anthropic's proactive agent app

Claude Duet is Anthropic's proactive agent, opened as a waitlisted research preview on 21 October 2026. It is a separate app in which Claude runs on a cloud computer of its own, checks your connected accounts every few hours, sends a morning brief, and asks before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything. We have not tested it and we have not taken it apart. This page records what Anthropic and others have published, who said each part, and what we would need to see before saying anything of our own.

Anthropic pitches it at professionals and small business owners, and MacRumors and 9to5Mac framed it as Anthropic's answer to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
The preview is limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the US who get an invitation. There is no separate price, but background checks count against your Claude usage limits.
Anthropic publishes a short list of actions it will not take even with your approval, such as trading securities or moving money between accounts.
Early users report mixed results: one found its first read of connected accounts mostly right, others describe an early iPhone test build and weak results on real tasks. Nobody we found had yet described an approval request for a payment or a signature.
Nothing here is a measurement. Claude Duet is not in our exam, has no score and no teardown.

What Claude Duet is, in Anthropic's words

Source snapshot, 22 October 2026: the description below comes from Anthropic's announcement, its product page and the getting-started help article.

The announcement calls it "a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent." The product page draws the line against ordinary Claude: the chat app waits for you to open it, and Duet comes to you. The product page describes a brief each morning with drafted next steps, after which it "goes quiet until something needs you." The help article paints a busier day: it sends updates on the work it is doing and follows up on threads that have gone quiet. Larger jobs, such as a dashboard, a deck or a financial model, come back as editable files in a tab called Make. A Tasks tab tracks what it is working on, and the help article says only you can mark a task complete.

It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and you cannot pick another model; the help article says it "decides how much effort a job needs." It starts from the Claude account you already have, so your memory, skills and connectors carry over, and the product page says your history sits in one thread.

The example jobs on the product page are a small business owner's week: scheduling interviews, summarising a contract redline, tracking a permit and paying the fee once approved, rebuilding an investor deck, chasing unpaid invoices, preparing payroll for review. The demo company has a daily "Pulse" page that refreshes revenue, cash and customer numbers before the brief.

All of that is a description of intent. It is a detailed one, and it is still not an observation.

Claude Duet waitlist: who can get it and what it costs

The help article sets three conditions: a Pro or Max plan, a US Claude account, and an invitation from the waitlist. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet, though Anthropic says it plans to add them. Invitations go out in waves, joining the list does not guarantee a date, and "access is tied to the email address you gave us." The help article says the waitlist form asks for your name, email, plan and phone type, and optionally what you do and what you would hand off first.

There is no extra charge during the preview. The cost shows up elsewhere: Duet draws on the same five-hour and weekly limits as chat, "at the same rate," and the morning brief and periodic checks count too. The announcement adds that larger tasks like financial models or decks use more. Anthropic is giving admitted users one full limit reset, usable until 30 November 2026. 9to5Mac reports Anthropic's own warning that those limits could be reached sooner than with chat alone.

For comparison, OpenAI also folds Dots into an existing plan rather than pricing them separately, but the cheapest way to a dot for an individual is $100 a month, per the figures on our Dots page. Duet's entry point is Claude Pro. We have not reloaded Claude's pricing page for this record, so we give no dollar figure.

Where the Claude Duet app runs, and what it connects to

Setup happens in the mobile app, on iPhone or Android. After that, the announcement and product page say you can reach it from the iOS app, the Android app or claude.ai on the web.

Coverage on launch day did not agree on this. MacRumors, in Juli Clover's report, says it "can be used via the web or a standalone Duet iOS app" and does not mention Android. 9to5Mac, in Marcus Mendes's report, lists iOS, Android and the web. Anthropic's own pages name all three, so we go with that, and the MacRumors line reads as an omission rather than a contradiction.

The work itself happens away from your devices. Per the announcement, Duet runs on its own virtual machine with its own browser, so your laptop or phone does not need to stay on. Per the help article, it cannot see the files on your computer or all of your Claude projects, and it can read but not edit your work in Claude. That is the opposite design from Claude Dispatch, which reaches into your desktop, and it sits on the cloud side of the line our where it runs page draws.

For apps, it uses the connectors you have already set up in Claude. The help article names Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Slack, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Docusign and Calendly; the announcement gives the catalogue as "over 6,000" connectors and plugins. For sites without a connector, it uses its cloud browser. Purchases go through Stripe's Link wallet or Shop Pay, and each one gets a one-time card. Anthropic says saved logins through 1Password are planned.

A catalogue number and a reachable number are different things. What Duet can actually do in a given account depends on which connectors you have switched on, and the help article already lists limits: Slack works with limits, and Microsoft 365 is not available yet.

What Claude Duet asks before it acts

This is the part our exam would care about most. Anthropic's pages describe three layers.

The first is approval. Before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting anything, Duet shows you the action and waits. The product page shows the prompt as two buttons, "Approve" and "Not now." If you do not answer, the help article says it finishes the rest of the task and comes back to the approval later, which is a sensible design for a phone app and a detail worth testing, because it means a half-finished job can be waiting on you.

The second is a short list of things it will not do even if you approve: trading securities, moving money between accounts, and accessing someone else's account. OpenAI's Dots handle the same territory differently; its FAQ makes you take over and finish actions like transferring money yourself.

The third is what Anthropic calls its safety layer. Per the announcement, Duet never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens; the help article says you type them into a separate form on your device. Anthropic says its actions are approved by its auto mode classifier, and that a dedicated classifier is designed to reject requests to share the most sensitive data, such as card numbers and government ID. It shares health and personal finance information only when you explicitly tell it to. Anthropic says it was red-teamed and penetration tested by an outside firm, and that it is covered by the public bug bounty.

On prompt injection, the help article is direct: Duet treats email and web content as information rather than commands, but "no defense is perfect" and it can be targeted.

Our own exam counts stepping over a payment, a signature or a final submission without the user's say-so as an unauthorised action, on its own line, as how the exam works explains. Duet's published approval list lines up almost item for item with that category. That makes it a good candidate for the exam, and it is the reason we will not credit it on paper. A published approval rule and an observed one are different kinds of evidence.

What Anthropic says Claude Duet cannot do yet

Anthropic's own list of limits is longer and more specific than most launch pages in this category. From the announcement and help article:

It may misread a thread or misjudge what is urgent.
It checks accounts at intervals, so something that arrives between checks can reach you late.
Personal errands such as booking tickets are weaker than business work.
You cannot watch or take over its browser.
It cannot make phone calls or send texts. It can send email from a connected account, with approval.
Disconnecting an app stops future access but does not remove what it already remembers from that app.

The last point is the one to note before connecting a work inbox. On memory, Duet can search your Duet chats and your non-project Claude chats for context; deleted chats drop out of that search, and you can switch it off under Settings, Memory, "Search and reference chats." What happens to memories built from a disconnected app is not spelled out beyond "kept."

Claude Duet review: what early users report

These are early reports collected on 23 October 2026 from comments in the Hacker News launch threads, from r/ClaudeAI on Reddit and from posts on X: people who say they used Claude Duet, plus a few who were admitted but could not get the app. We left out restatements of the announcement, news rewrites, waitlist sign-ups, posts about other agents and posts by Anthropic staff. Each one is an individual anecdote, none of it is ours, and none of it is a rate.

What people say went well:

Peter Yang (X, 21 October) had access before launch and, in an updated review of four agents, put Duet third, after Grok Bot and Muse and ahead of Dots, calling it the "most proactive out of the box." The main complaint was features missing from the preview, such as being able to drive its browser.
Dan Osterman (X, 22 October) says it read the calendar, Slack and email accounts connected to it and gave a read on working habits that was "mostly right." It then picked up small jobs, such as checking on a pending model API and writing up a bug fix, on a drafts-then-approve pattern.
Ligaya Beebe (X, 22 October) reports that its first move was an accurate summary of the business and a short list of things it could start on. Its second was saying it could not connect more than one Gmail account.
AndyEMD (r/ClaudeAI, 22 October) gave it a trip-booking task and called the result "pretty dang comprehensive." It could not enter payment details, so it put together a budget, booking links, a day-by-day itinerary and equipment rentals, taking the dates from flight confirmations already in the connected email. Run against the same task, Dots was a little more thorough on budgeting, but it asked for confirmations where Duet went and found the answers; the thread calls it a tie so far.

What people say went badly:

joshstrange (Hacker News, 22 October), who has used both Dots and Duet, rates Dots the better product for now. In that account, Duet filled the chat with cards for the tickets it looked up, and on a performance-review task it lacked the employee-completed reviews and the required layout but drafted reviews from Obsidian notes instead of asking for the missing form or rubric. It also suggested booking a meeting with what the post calls an email spammer.
Todd Dailey (X, 22 October) posted a five-minute walkthrough and called it a very early test build, "basically Claude Projects in an app," not yet at the level of Grok Bot or Muse.
korben (X, 22 October) says the test build drew on existing Claude usage, that usage was down 30%, and that all Duet had done was recommend an audiobook. Anthropic's help article warns that background checks count against the same limits.
Stack Snacks (X, 23 October) says Opus handled most tasks but you cannot see the browser screen while it works, one of the limits Anthropic lists.

On what Duet will say about itself, russellbeattie (Hacker News, 21 October) asked it for a file listing of its VM to compare it with Muse. It declined, replying that it could not share its setup, instructions or skills. The comment contrasts that with Muse, whose phone app has a button to view its system files; our Muse teardown covers what that per-user VM holds.

Getting in has been its own problem. Jasson Gutierrez (X, 22 October) says the waitlist let them in but the test-build invitation never arrived. Jeremy Roseberry (X, 22 October) says the "get the app" link went to the ordinary Claude app instead. On r/ClaudeAI on 22 October, zman9119 had no luck getting the app on either Android or iOS; a later comment says the web version worked, the download link showed "App not available", and Duet itself filed the bug report. Strict_External678 (22 October) had Duet on the web but could not find it in the Play Store. Everyone we found who named a working build (AndyEMD on Reddit; Todd Dailey, korben and s orr y on X) described TestFlight, Apple's test channel for iPhone apps; we found nobody reporting that they were running the Android app. One admitted user, s orr y (X, 22 October), found the free limit reset on the usage page, as the help article promises.

What nobody we found has described yet: the morning brief arriving, an approval request for a payment, signature or deletion, or how a task parked on "Not now" looks when you come back to it. Those are the same open questions listed under why it has no score here.

Claude Duet vs Dots, Muse and Dispatch

The comparison below uses only what each maker has published, plus our own teardown where one exists. It is not a ranking; we have run none of these four through the same tasks.

	Claude Duet	OpenAI Dots	Meta Muse	Claude Dispatch
Where work runs	Anthropic cloud VM, no local access	OpenAI cloud; optional local computer access	Per-user VM	Your desktop, messaged from your phone
Entry plan	Claude Pro or Max, US, waitlist	ChatGPT Pro from $100 a month, outside the EEA, UK and Switzerland	See our teardown	Existing Pro and Max users only
Approval rule published	Send, pay, sign, delete	Tiered: take over, approve each time, or approve in advance	See our teardown	See our record
Our evidence	Public record	Public record	Teardown and exam figures	Public record

The one cell that matters most is the last row. Muse has been through our process; the other three have not.

Not duet.so, Google Duet AI or GitLab Duo

If you searched for Claude Duet this week, you may have landed somewhere else. duet.so is an unrelated site whose pages compare its own Duet agents with Claude and Claude Code; its home page, when we read it on 22 October, was a launch placeholder, and nothing on that page mentions Anthropic. Google's Duet AI was the earlier name for Gemini in Google Workspace and Google Cloud, and it has nothing to do with Claude. GitLab Duo is GitLab's assistant, which can run Claude models but is GitLab's product.

The name will keep catching people for a while. This page is about Anthropic's app only.

Why Claude Duet has no score here

Claude Duet is not in our exam and we have not taken it apart. It is recorded on the landscape list, with its sources, and that is all. It gets a page like the ones we wrote for Dots, Poke, Cue, Copilot Tasks and Claude Dispatch, not a place with the teardowns.

If it ever goes through our process, these are the questions it would need to settle, roughly in order of how much they would change a reader's decision. Does the approval gate fire on a payment that is phrased as something else, like "settle this invoice." What a job waiting on "Not now" looks like when you come back to it, and whether anything already happened. Whether an instruction planted in a connected inbox gets treated as information, as the help article says, when it arrives inside a thread Duet is already working on. How late a "check at intervals" agent is on something time-sensitive. And what a memory built from a disconnected app is, given that Anthropic says it is kept.

None of this is a judgement on the product. A blank is not a low score.

FAQ

What is Claude Duet? Anthropic's proactive agent app, opened as a research preview on 21 October 2026. It runs Claude Opus 5.5 on a cloud computer, checks your connected accounts every few hours, sends a morning brief, and asks before sending, paying, signing or deleting.

How do I get Claude Duet? Join the waitlist on the Claude Duet product page. You need a Claude Pro or Max plan and a US account, and invitations go out in waves. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet.

How much does Claude Duet cost? Nothing extra during the preview. It shares your Pro or Max usage limits, and its background checks count against them. Admitted users get one full limit reset, usable until 30 November 2026.

Is Claude Duet any good? We have not tested it. Early users writing on X, Hacker News and Reddit between 21 and 23 October report mixed results: one said its read of connected calendar, Slack and email accounts was mostly right, others reported weak results on real tasks, and one reviewer with early access ranked it third of four agents. Their accounts are in the section on what early users report.

Is Claude Duet on Android? Anthropic's announcement and product page say it runs on iOS, Android and the web at claude.ai. MacRumors' launch report mentions only iOS and the web.

Is Claude Duet the same as Claude Dispatch? No. Dispatch lets you message Claude from your phone while it works on your desktop. Duet runs in Anthropic's cloud with no access to your computer, and reaches out to you on its own schedule.

Is Claude Duet the same as duet.so? No. duet.so is a separate company's product. Claude Duet is made by Anthropic.

Other agents we have not taken apart

Every product we track, and how far we have got with each, is on the full list.