Anthropic enters proactive-agent race with Claude Duet

Anthropic launched Claude Duet on October 21, a proactive AI agent that competes directly with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. Available as a research preview via waitlist to US-based Pro and Max subscribers, Duet ships as a standalone app on iOS and Android and through Claude on the web. It runs on Opus 5.5 and operates on its own virtual machine with a dedicated browser, allowing it to complete tasks in the background without an active Claude session. Each morning the agent generates a short briefing drawn from a user's connected apps, and throughout the day it monitors those apps and messages the user only when something requires action. Users can hand Duet tasks ranging from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, creating forecasts, prototyping, and constructing web apps. The agent inherits memory, skills, and app connections already stored in a user's Claude account, so setup is minimal, and all interactions happen in a single ongoing thread. Duet works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins. A safety guardrail requires user approval before consequential actions such as sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting a file. Anthropic says it built Duet for professionals and small business owners who have more to track than they can manage alone. The launch follows OpenAI's release of Dots by several weeks and arrives amid a surge in popularity for Meta's Muse. By matching the core feature set of both rivals, including background execution on a virtual machine, morning briefings, and app-connector breadth, Anthropic is positioning Claude Duet as a direct substitute rather than a differentiated alternative. The research-preview framing and waitlist gate suggest Anthropic is throttling initial access, and no timeline for broader availability was disclosed.

(Source：Vector Wire)