nthropic has unveiled its answer to the growing frenzy around personal AI agents.

On Wednesday, the AI lab announced Claude Duet, an app that allows the company's flagship chatbot to work as a "proactive agent," available in research preview by waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers. The company said that Duet is built for professionals and small business owners with "more on their plates than they can track."

Anthropic said that Duet will complete tasks when directed, keep working when users step away, keep track of tasks that require user attention, and check with a user prior to acting on their behalf. The agent is designed around Claude Opus 5.5, the most powerful model in its Opus lineup.

• Duet will send a short brief to users each morning with the most important tasks or information across a user's connected Claude apps, and keeps tabs on those apps throughout the day. However, it will only reach out if something requires a user's attention.
• The company said the agent can handle a large range of tasks, both simple and complex, from scheduling meetings to building dashboards or developing financial forecasts.
• User context from Claude is the foundation of Duet, carrying over memory, skills and connected apps from a user's existing account. Duet can work with the more than 6,000 plug-ins in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Canva, Shopify and more.

Addressing safety, Duet is built on the company's framework for trustworthy agents, which also is the base of Claude Code and Claude in Chrome. The agent also never sees user passwords or sign-in tokens, defends against prompt injection attacks, and approves actions through its "auto mode classifier," which prevents it from taking actions that a user didn't request. Duet also includes its own dedicated classifier and safety system that checks messages and guards against sensitive information leaks.

Duet adds to a growing pool of options for personal AI agents. At rival OpenAI's Dev Day in late September, the lab unveiled its addition to this trend with Dots, an always-on agent with its own cloud computer that similarly works across users' connected apps. Meta's version of this is Muse, the agentic app the company launched at its Meta Connect event in September that has since faced backlash over data privacy concerns.

Our Deeper View

Once OpenAI unveiled Dots, It was only a matter of time before Anthropic came to the table with its own take on the personal, always-on agent. Though OpenAI got to it first, that doesn't necessarily mean that the first-mover advantage will go far in winning over users. In fact, because users are largely comfortable switching between models or leveraging both as they become commoditized, it's likely that both Dots and Duet will have a place in professional workflows. It's something that even OpenAI's Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux acknowledged in a post on X on Wednesday, saying "Dot, meet Duet. Duet, meet Dot. Be nice to each other." Together, however, these innovations signal a bigger shift towards seamless, easy-to-use agents that operate across a user's context and can be integrated into workflows straight off the shelf.