Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet on October 21, a standalone app that turns Claude into a proactive agent rather than a chatbot that sits idle waiting for prompts. Instead of answering only when questioned, Duet sends a short morning brief on the items that need attention across your connected apps, then keeps working in the background while you step away.
The app is built on Claude Opus 5.5 and runs on its own computer in the cloud, so tasks continue after the phone or laptop is closed. It carries over existing Claude memory, skills, and connected apps, and works with more than 6,000 integrations including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, and Shopify. A cloud browser handles sites that have no connector. Anthropic says Duet asks first before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything, and that it never directly sees your passwords.
Claude Duet is available on iOS, Android, and claude.ai as a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers in the United States, starting with a waitlist. Background work counts against existing plan limits. Anthropic describes it as an early version that can still misjudge what is urgent, and notes it lives in its own app separate from the main Claude app for now. The launch lands in a fast-moving personal agent race alongside Meta's Muse and xAI's Grok Bot.