Claude Duet Research Preview: Anthropic's Proactive Agent App

Anthropic has opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app in which Claude works as a proactive agent: it watches your connected apps, tells you what needs attention, and runs tasks in the background while asking before it acts for you. It is included in the Pro and Max plans, shares their usage limits, and is starting with US users through a waitlist. Anthropic announced it on October 21, 2026 in Introducing Claude Duet, and the Claude release notes list the preview for Pro and Max users on the same date.

What Claude Duet does

Anthropic says it built Duet for professionals and small business owners. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and brings over your memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account. The main features, as the announcement describes them:

• Morning brief. A short daily summary of the most important items across your connected apps.
• Monitoring. It checks connected accounts every few hours and messages you only when something needs attention. You choose what you want to hear about and how often.
• Tasks. You type or speak to it in one ongoing thread. Anthropic’s examples run from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, financial or sales forecasts, prototypes and web apps.
• Its own computer. Duet runs on its own virtual machine with its own browser, so your laptop or phone does not need to be on. It notifies you when a task finishes or needs review.

It is a separate app on iOS and Android, and on claude.ai, not a mode inside the main Claude app.

What it does alone and what needs approval

Duet can read, draft and prepare work by itself. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you the exact action and waits for your approval. Some actions are blocked even with approval: it will not trade securities or move money between accounts. You can disconnect any app it has access to.

Action	How Duet handles it
Read, draft, prepare work	On its own
Send, pay, sign, delete	Shows the exact action, waits for approval
Trade securities, move money between accounts	Not allowed, even with approval

For connections it uses the Claude Marketplace, which Anthropic says holds over 6,000 connectors and plugins. The announcement names Gmail, Slack, Intuit QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, LinkedIn, Docusign, HubSpot, Canva and Shopify. Purchases go through Stripe’s Link, which asks you to approve the spend and pays with a virtual card so your real card number is not shared, or through Shopify’s Shop Pay at online stores. Signing in to sites with logins saved in 1Password is listed as “coming soon”.

On safety, Anthropic says Duet handles credentials the way Claude Managed Agents does, so it never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens, and that its actions are checked by the auto mode classifier. A new classifier screens messages for sensitive information: requests to share credit card numbers or government ID are rejected, and health and personal finance details are shared only when you explicitly tell it to.

Usage limits and the known weak spots

There is no separate price. Duet counts against your normal Pro or Max limits, and Anthropic notes that background checks and larger tasks, such as financial models or decks, use them up. If you already hit your weekly limit with chat and Claude Code, a background agent checking your inbox every few hours will make that worse. Our Claude review explains how the five-hour and weekly limits work.

Anthropic is also open about what does not work well yet. Duet may misread a thread or misjudge urgency, it is weaker at personal errands such as booking tickets than at work tasks, and it cannot yet show you its browser while it works.

Should you join the waitlist?

The announcement includes accounts from Anthropic staff and early testers. In Anthropic’s examples, one brokerage owner says a flagged calendar mistake was “exactly the kind of thing I want caught”, and a restaurant owner says “I don’t need to open up 100 tabs.” These are Anthropic’s chosen quotes, not independent tests.

If you are a US Pro or Max subscriber who spends the morning triaging Gmail, Slack and a CRM, it costs nothing extra to sign up and see whether the brief saves time. Anthropic says the preview starts with US Pro and Max users and has not given dates for other plans or countries. For a broader comparison of the two main assistants, see ChatGPT vs Claude. For other recent Anthropic changes, read about Claude Design moving into Claude and the Claude Sonnet 5.5 launch, or browse all AI news.