Claude Duet Is Here: An Agent That Works While You're Away

On October 21, Anthropic introduced Claude Duet, a new app, separate from the main Claude app, in which Claude works as a proactive agent. It’s a research preview for now. With it, Anthropic joins the race for always-on personal agents that OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse sped up. The target audience is professionals and small business owners. To us, the most interesting part of the announcement is where the agent stops and asks for permission.

What happened

According to Anthropic, Duet was designed around Claude Opus 5.5 and runs on iOS, Android and claude.ai. Access opens through a waitlist, starting with Pro and Max subscribers in the US. For the research preview there’s no separate fee: Duet is included in the Pro and Max plans and shares the plan’s usage limits. Team and Enterprise plans aren’t included yet.

The day starts with a short morning brief on what matters across your connected apps. During the day Duet checks your connected accounts every few hours. Anthropic says continuous checking would burn through plan limits too quickly, and you decide what you want to hear about and how often. Duet runs on a virtual machine with its own browser, so your laptop or phone doesn’t need to be on.

Memory, skills and connected apps carry over from your Claude account, and you work with Duet in one ongoing thread, by typing or by voice. It can use more than 6,000 connectors and plugins from the Claude Marketplace. Anthropic’s examples read like a small business owner’s week: finding missed Gmail and Slack messages and drafting replies, checking QuickBooks or Stripe for unpaid invoices and drafting reminders, preparing payroll in Gusto, getting an agreement ready for signature in Docusign, drafting follow-ups from HubSpot data, turning a product launch into a social campaign in Canva, and setting up and running a Shopify store. For purchases it uses a virtual card from Link, Stripe’s digital wallet, and Shopify’s Shop Pay. Signing in to sites through 1Password is listed as “coming soon.”

How the approval gates work

Duet reads, drafts and prepares work on its own. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you the planned action and waits for your approval. Trading securities and moving money between accounts are off-limits even if you approve. You can disconnect any app it has access to at any time.

On security, Anthropic says Duet never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens. A dedicated classifier rejects requests to share credit card numbers and government ID numbers. The app went through red team exercises and an external penetration test.

Anthropic is upfront about the limits as well. Duet can misread a thread or misjudge what’s urgent. It was built mainly for work, so it’s weaker at personal errands like booking tickets. It can’t show you its browser yet, and it lives apart from the main Claude app. Dots lets you open the agent’s cloud computer and inspect its work at any time, so this is a concrete difference between the two.

Meanwhile at OpenAI: parallel agents in GPT-6 Pro

On October 16, OpenAI updated GPT-6 Pro, according to its ChatGPT release notes. The note says GPT-6 Pro now responds faster, makes better use of plugins and tools, and can use multiple agents working in parallel on different parts of a task. You can follow their progress in the conversation and open finished tasks to see what each agent did. The update is rolling out to eligible Pro users. The note stops there: it doesn’t say how many agents run, how a task gets split up or what it costs.

What the headlines overstate

On Reddit, Duet is being described as an agent that works on its own and watches your apps. The product Anthropic describes is more cautious. Duet checks your accounts every few hours, and the stated reason is usage limits. Every hard-to-reverse step, whether money, signatures, messages or deletions, needs your approval, and some financial actions are blocked outright. It’s a research preview, opening by waitlist and only to Pro and Max subscribers in the US.

You can’t use it from Turkey today. The announcement says access starts with US subscribers and gives no date for other countries.

What it means for your brand

Duet is aimed at the small business owner who runs their own inbox, invoices and calendar. That person may be your customer, supplier or partner. When they use an agent like this, your email, your proposal and your website get read by the agent first, and the message that makes it into the morning brief is the one the agent decided was important.

Most of what that calls for is familiar. Subject lines should say what you’re asking for and by when. Prices, timelines and validity dates in a proposal shouldn’t be buried in an image or a designed PDF; put them in plain text as well. The service, pricing and contact details on your website should be readable by an agent. We laid out the basics of preparing a site for agents in our Dots post.

On the ecommerce side, Duet shopping through Shopify and Stripe Link suggests agent purchases will run through integrations like these. If you export to the US, a buyer’s agent could be visiting your site already.

There’s a lesson for your own team too. In Anthropic’s model, reading and preparing are free, sending and paying need approval, and some actions are closed entirely. If your team is going to use agents, we suggest writing the same split into your own processes.

What you can do

1. Review the email templates that go to customers and partners. The subject line should state the request and the date, and the important details should sit in the first paragraph.
2. In proposals, give price, timeline and validity in plain text alongside the designed file.
3. Put service, pricing and contact details on your site as text, and complete your structured data.
4. If you use Shopify or Stripe, test where an agent’s purchase gets stuck; human verification can stop an agent too.
5. If your team is going to try an agent, write down up front which tasks need approval and which stay off-limits.

Our recommendation at Klyne

On our Webflow web design projects, we build sites to be readable by human visitors and agents alike: a clear heading structure, plain-text service and contact details, and structured data. Markdown versions of our own pages and an llms.txt file are live. These steps also help classic SEO and user experience, so we’d suggest starting now, before Duet reaches Turkey.

FAQ

Can I use Claude Duet in Turkey?

Not yet. According to Anthropic, access opens through a waitlist and starts with Pro and Max subscribers in the US. No date has been announced for other countries.

Does Claude Duet cost extra?

Not during the research preview. Duet is included in the Pro and Max plans and shares the plan’s usage limits. Background checks and larger tasks, such as building a financial model or a deck, draw more from those limits, which is also how Anthropic explains why Duet checks your accounts every few hours.

How is Claude Duet different from OpenAI Dots?

Both work in a cloud environment with their own browser while you’re away, and both ask for approval on sensitive actions. Dots runs inside ChatGPT and through Slack and Teams, and you can open the agent’s computer and inspect its work. Duet is a separate app, can’t show its browser yet, and won’t trade securities or move money between accounts even with your approval.

Let’s plan your website, emails and proposals so agents can read them too: get in touch.