Anthropic opens Claude Duet preview, pitching proactive…

The waitlisted research preview, announced October 21, puts Anthropic directly against Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots in a race to build always-on agents for owner-operators.

Anthropic opened a waitlisted research preview of Claude Duet on October 21, a standalone agent app built around Claude Opus 5.5 and pitched, in the company’s words, “for professionals and small business owners with more on their plates than they can track.” It’s Anthropic’s entry into a crowded field of always-on agents from frontier labs, and the first from the company to put the small-business owner at the center of the frame.

Duet runs on iOS, Android, and claude.ai, and is included in Pro and Max plans for U.S. subscribers. Mechanically, it’s a departure from the prompt-and-wait pattern: Anthropic says Duet runs on its own virtual machine with a browser so tasks continue when the user’s device is off, sends a short morning brief across connected apps, and checks those apps every few hours (not continuously), messaging the user only when something needs attention.

The integration surface is wide. Over 6,000 connectors and plugins, Anthropic says, including Gmail, Slack, HubSpot, Stripe, QuickBooks, Gusto, Docusign, Canva, and Shopify. Duet can draft follow-up emails from HubSpot deal history, prepare pre-call briefs from a user’s calendar, build sales forecasts, and draft job postings for LinkedIn. Purchases route through Stripe’s Link digital wallet or Shop Pay with a virtual card, so the real card number isn’t shared. Trading securities and moving money between accounts are off-limits even with approval.

The approval gate is the real design decision. Duet reads, drafts, and prepares work on its own, but before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything, it shows the exact action and waits for sign-off. Anthropic also cautions that the preview “might misread a thread or miscalibrate what’s urgent,” and TechCrunch notes Duet can’t yet show its browser as it works.

The competitive context is loud. CNBC frames Duet as likely to challenge OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse, the latter of which Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the same day’s earnings call has now been set up by more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada over the past month and a half, a figure The Agentic Review already tracked at the 10-million mark.

Four labs, one blueprint: proactive, approval-gated, aimed at the owner-operator. The question we asked yesterday about whether a $20-a-month agent is actually AI is about to get a louder answer, because the category is standardizing faster than its buyers can evaluate it.

Anthropic opens Claude Duet preview, pitching proactive agent at small business owners

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