Anthropic

AI Agents · Productivity Software · Enterprise AI

Launch

Anthropic launches Claude Duet, an always-on AI work agent

Without an assistant of its own, Anthropic risked losing daily user habits to Meta and OpenAI's already popular agents.

• Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent built on Claude Opus 5.5, available via waitlist to US Pro and Max subscribers on iOS, Android, and claude.ai.
• Duet runs on its own cloud virtual machine with a browser so it keeps working after a user closes the app, and it connects to more than 6,000 integrations including Gmail, Slack, Stripe, Docusign, and Shopify.
• Duet never directly sees passwords or logins, uses a dedicated classifier to screen for sensitive data, and must get user approval before payments, signing documents, or deleting files; bank transfers are blocked outright.
• Duet arrives after Meta's Muse launched September 8 and reached over 10 million users in the US and Canada, OpenAI debuted Dots weeks later, and xAI opened a Grok Bot beta in August.
• Anthropic said in April that over 1,000 business customers were each spending more than $1 million annualized on its tools, double the count from two months earlier, underscoring its enterprise focus ahead of Duet.
• Always-on assistants are poised to become the default entry point for daily AI use, so whoever owns that habit could capture outsized engagement regardless of which underlying model users actually prefer.