Anthropic has entered the personal agent race with Claude Duet, a new "research" preview announced on Wednesday. The company positions it as a rival to Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots. Duet is designed to surface what needs your attention, complete tasks you assign, keep working when you step away, and check with you before acting on your behalf.
Each day, Duet generates a short briefing listing action items drawn from your connected apps. Users can hand it tasks ranging from scheduling meetings and building dashboards to creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping, and building web apps. Duet runs on Opus 5.5, one of the models available through Claude, and runs on its own virtual machine so it can work in the background without a Claude session open. Anthropic is releasing standalone Android and iOS apps for it.
Access is currently limited to a waitlist open to Claude subscribers in the US. Anthropic says the $20 per month Pro plan will receive access once Duet reaches general availability. That contrasts with OpenAI's Dots, which is currently limited to Pro tier subscribers whose plans start at $100 per month. Duet shares usage limits with other Claude tools, including Code. To manage this, it checks connected accounts every few hours, and users will be able to set how often it messages them and on which topics.
On security, Anthropic says Duet uses a new classifier and system prompt to prevent leaks of sensitive information. It will never directly see passwords or sign-in tokens, and health or personal finance information is shared only if the user explicitly instructs it to. Anthropic says more safety details will follow in the coming days. How useful Duet proves may depend on how much users trust Anthropic with their digital lives.
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing