What is Claude Duet? Anthropic's proactive agent app, explained

Claude Duet is a separate app from Anthropic in which Claude works as a proactive agent. Instead of waiting for you to ask, it sends you a brief each morning from your email and calendar, checks your accounts every few hours, and follows up on threads that have gone quiet. It works from its own cloud computer and asks before it acts on your behalf. Anthropic opened it as a waitlisted research preview on October 21, 2026, for US subscribers on Claude Pro, Max and Ultra (Anthropic).

It’s not the regular Claude chat app. Duet is a standalone app on iPhone and Android and on the web at claude.ai, with a single ongoing thread you message the way you’d message a person.

What Claude Duet does

Anthropic describes Duet as built “for professionals and small business owners with more on their plates than they can track” (Anthropic). Its day looks like this, per the help center:

• Morning brief. Each morning it reviews your email and calendar, sends a short brief on what matters most, and can start first steps such as drafting replies.
• Check-ins. It checks connected accounts every few hours rather than constantly, because checking nonstop would use up your plan’s limits much faster. It messages you only when something needs your attention, and you can tell it what to report and how often.
• Real work. It uses a cloud computer with its own browser, so it keeps going when your phone is off, and it works with over 6,000 connectors and plugins. Larger jobs come back as editable briefs, decks and dashboards.
• What it already knows. It carries over your Claude memory, skills and connectors from the first message.

It runs on Claude Opus 5.5. You can’t choose another model; Duet decides how much effort a job needs.

What it asks first, and what it won’t do

Before Duet sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you exactly what it’s about to do and waits for approval. Each purchase is approved separately and paid with a one-time card number through Link or Shop Pay (help center).

Some things are off-limits even if you approve them: trading securities, moving money between accounts and accessing someone else’s account. Duet never sees your passwords or sign-in tokens, and a classifier blocks it from sharing the most sensitive data, such as card numbers and government IDs.

How to get Claude Duet, and what it costs

1. Join the waitlist from the product page with the email on your Claude account, and pick your plan and phone type.
2. Wait for an invite. They go out in waves with no set date.
3. Open the invite on your phone and sign in.

There’s no extra charge during the preview: Duet is included with Claude Pro ($20 a month), Max ($100) and Ultra ($200) (pricing). It shares your plan’s 5-hour and weekly usage limits, and its background checks count too, so a busy Duet on Pro can eat into your regular Claude chats. It isn’t on Team or Enterprise plans yet, and it’s US only.

Limits to know

Anthropic is upfront that this is a preview. Per the help center:

• You can’t watch Duet work in its browser or take it over.
• Something urgent can arrive between check-ins.
• It doesn’t call or text other people; email is allowed, with approval.
• Microsoft 365 isn’t available yet, and Slack is a connector rather than a place to chat with Duet.
• It “might misread a thread or miscalibrate what’s urgent”.

Anthropic’s launch article and help center don’t say whether Duet’s data is used for training, so check your Claude privacy settings.

How Claude Duet compares

• dots are OpenAI’s equivalent inside ChatGPT. You can reach a dot in Slack and Microsoft Teams as well as ChatGPT, and take over its computer, but you need ChatGPT Pro from $100 a month. See what dots is.
• Muse is Meta’s agent for everyday errands, free to start in five countries, with no waitlist.
• Poke also messages you first, but you text it in iMessage or Telegram, and it has a free plan.

Duet is a good fit if you already pay for Claude in the US and your day runs on email and a calendar: it costs nothing extra and starts from what Claude knows about you. If you can’t get an invite, or you want an assistant you can text, see the best AI assistants.