Anthropic on October 21 launched Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent that competes directly with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots2,3,4. The agent is available as a research preview, accessible via waitlist to US-based Pro and Max subscribers1.
Claude Duet ships as a standalone app on iOS and Android and through Claude on the web6. It runs on Opus 5.5 and operates on its own virtual machine with a dedicated browser, allowing it to complete tasks in the background without requiring an active Claude session.
Each morning the agent generates a short briefing drawn from a user's connected apps, surfacing items that need attention. Throughout the day it monitors those apps and messages the user only when something requires action5. Anthropic says users can hand Duet tasks ranging from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping, and constructing web apps.
The agent inherits memory, skills, and app connections already stored in a user's Claude account, so setup is minimal. All interactions happen in a single ongoing thread rather than across separate conversations. Duet works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins.
A safety guardrail requires user approval before the agent takes consequential actions such as sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting a file.
Anthropic says it built Duet for professionals and small business owners who have more to track than they can manage on their own. The launch follows OpenAI's release of Dots, its own proactive agent, by several weeks, and arrives amid a surge in popularity for Meta's Muse. ANALYSIS By matching the core feature set of both rivals, including background execution on a virtual machine, morning briefings, and app-connector breadth, Anthropic is positioning Claude Duet as a direct substitute rather than a differentiated alternative.
The research-preview framing and waitlist gate suggest Anthropic is throttling initial access. No timeline for broader availability was disclosed in the announcement.