Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive personal agent

[Tracey]

Anthropic has announced a new personal agent called Claude Duet. Engadget's Igor Bonifacic reports that it is Anthropic's answer to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. As always, it is worth noting that Anthropic makes Claude, so this is a company announcing its own product

Claude Duet is a proactive agent. It sends a short daily briefing of action items from connected apps, and can handle tasks such as scheduling meetings, building dashboards, making forecasts and prototyping web apps. It checks with the user before taking any action

Duet runs on Opus 5.5 in its own virtual machine, so it can work in the background, and it has standalone apps for iOS and Android. Access is currently through a waitlist for US Claude subscribers only, as a research preview

Anthropic says 20 dollar a month Pro users will get it when it becomes generally available, whereas OpenAI's Dots needs a Pro plan costing 100 dollars or more. Duet shares usage limits with Claude Code. Anthropic also says it never sees passwords or sign in tokens directly

Proactive agents are the new battleground for AI companies, as the Meta Muse privacy problem showed this week. Asking before acting is a sensible design choice. Pricing it for ordinary subscribers could help it spread quickly, if it works well

Would you let an AI agent manage your schedule and tasks? And does asking before acting make you more comfortable with it?

Claude Duet is Anthropicwww.engadget.com