Anthropic puts Claude Duet into research preview, an agent that does office work while your laptop is shut

The personal agent race now has three big American entries, and Anthropic was the last to arrive. Claude Duet, announced October 21 and opened as a research preview, is built for work rather than errands. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 inside a dedicated cloud computer, so a task keeps moving after the laptop closes.

The daily shape is simple. Duet starts with a morning briefing drawn from connected apps such as email and calendars. It can prepare replies, then checks back every few hours for developments the user asked it to watch. Anthropic is plain about the limits. The checks are not continuous, an urgent message can sit until the next round, and the agent can misjudge a conversation or get urgency wrong. It cannot yet show the user its browser.

The work list is office work. With connections to QuickBooks and Stripe it can spot unpaid invoices and draft reminders. With Gusto it can prepare payroll for review. With HubSpot it can write follow ups based on a deal history. It can build forecasts, dashboards and web applications, and finished work lands in a Make tab for review and editing, while a Tasks tab tracks what is running. Anthropic says Duet works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins already in its marketplace, including Spotify, Ticketmaster, Canva and Splice.

The guardrails are part of the pitch. Duet asks for approval before it sends a message, pays for anything, signs an agreement or deletes anything. Purchases run through Stripe Link flow with a spending authorization request. Securities trades and transfers between financial accounts are barred outright, even if the user authorizes them. It has no direct access to passwords or tokens, and health and finance data are blocked by default.

The competition set the scale the same week. On Meta earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the United States and Canada have set up Muse personal agents in about six weeks, that about a quarter of them use the agent daily, and that Muse is highly unprofitable. OpenAI Dots agent is the third entry. Anthropic arrives with a different bet, that the paying customer for an always on agent is a professional or a small business owner who wants invoices chased and briefings written, not a shopper who wants a table booked. Its own customer examples point that way, including a restaurant business with about 110 employees using Duet across accounting, support, marketing and invoices. Access is waitlisted for American Pro and Max subscribers, and the background checks count against existing plan limits.