Persistent agents are emerging as the next evolution of AI, but the company at the forefront of the AI revolution in 2026 has just gotten in the game.

Claude Duet, Anthropic's answer to Meta Muse, ChatGPT Dots, and GrokBot, arrived as a "research preview" last month, and I've gotten the opportunity to use it since then as well as ask the Anthropic team a few questions about it. I've also gotten the opportunity to compare Duet to Dots and Muse, both of which I've also been testing.

Persistent agents run in the background on a cloud computer, have their own web browser, connect to apps and services you give them access to, carry out multi-step workflows, monitor your files and messages for important updates, and proactively alert you when there are high-priority items that need your attention.

In my testing, I gave Claude Duet the same access to my Slack and Google Workspace accounts that I gave to OpenAI's Dots. As I wrote last week, Dots has proven to be more useful and proactive than Duet. But I've also given ChatGPT a little more context about my work over the last few years, so I'm conscious of the fact that that could be part of the difference. I give Muse far less access and context and so it's mostly helpful with shopping and very specific jobs.

Where Duet stands out is being extremely task-oriented. While Dots will simply surface information as a heads-up, such as conflicting meeting times or changing details on a project, almost everything Duet surfaces involves an offer to carry out a task—typically something it can do or fix for you—and then immediately gives you a button to click either Start or Edit.

"Claude Duet’s biggest differentiator is its judgment," an Anthropic spokesperson told The Deep View. "It is meant to be a resourceful agent that decides what needs you, what can wait, and when to check with you first."

In answering my questions about Duet, Anthropic also clarified a few things:

• Duet carries over your memory, skills, and connected apps from your Claude account
• Anthropic is fine-tuning Duet's judgment based on what early-access testers report
• Every message Claude Duet drafts and every file it uploads, go through a safety classifier to check for sensitive information
• The Anthropic team spends a lot of time calibrating how often Claude Duet asks for approval since approval fatigue is an issue that remains top of mind
• What’s urgent differs from person to person, so Anthropic found building an eval for it was imperfect but quite helpful, and that's another thing the team is evolving with feedback from early testers

For now, Claude Duet is only available to paid subscribers on Pro, Max, and Ultra plans who join the waitlist. On mobile, Claude Duet is a standalone app that is separate from Claude, but the web and desktop versions have Duet as one of the options in the left nav.

Our Deeper View

My experience with Claude Duet has been that it's a little less aggressive than Dots or Muse in proactively prompting me. But it's also more action-oriented, and ready to carry out tasks that anticipate my needs. For example, when someone sends me an email and says let's make our next steps A, B, and C, Duet jumps on that and offers to start drafting a document to get that rolling. Or, when highly time sensitive emails arrive, it not only alerts me but drafts a potential response that I can send or edit. Lots of us have been manually prompting AI to do these kinds of things for the past several years. AI becoming proactive and prompting you is the next stage. Dots and Duet are just the beginning, and they are general agents that can work across your entire life. For professionals and organizations, look for enterprise platforms from your systems of record to start offering similar persistent agents that deal with the data they manage in secure and compliant ways. And then the next step after that will be those agents talking to your personal agents.