Anthropic Launches Claude Duet, a Standalone AI Agent App

What happened

Claude Duet is a standalone app for iOS, Android and the claude.ai website. Instead of waiting for the user's prompts, it connects to the user's apps: it pushes a morning briefing each day and checks app status every few hours, proactively sending alerts when something needs attention. Anthropic positions it as an assistant that acts before being asked.

On capability, Duet spans simple administrative tasks such as scheduling meetings to complex ones like building financial forecast models and generating full web apps; it reuses the memory, skills and connected apps in the user's Claude account, with interactions converging in one continuous conversation thread. Sensitive actions — sending messages, making payments, signing documents, deleting files — require user approval; Duet never sees passwords or login credentials when connecting accounts, and a dedicated classifier plus a safety system prompt check each message to prevent sensitive information leaks.

On rollout, Duet is waitlist-only: the first wave is limited to Pro and Max subscribers in the United States, sharing existing plan usage limits, with background checks counting toward them as well.

Key facts

Compiled from Reuters and MacRumors reports on October 21: Duet was announced by Anthropic and is built on Opus 5.5; it runs on iOS, Android and claude.ai; it connects through 6,000-plus connectors in the Claude Marketplace (including Gmail and Slack) and supports purchases via Stripe's Link digital wallet and Shopify's Shop Pay.

Anthropic acknowledged that Duet can misjudge the urgency of items and remains weaker at personal tasks such as booking tickets. On the competitive landscape: OpenAI launched its always-on "dots" agents last month, and Meta's Muse agent has already drawn millions of downloads.