Anthropic's Claude Duet: an always-on agent, waitlist only

Anthropic published a product page for Claude Duet on 21 October 2026, describing it as "a proactive agent that understands what needs your attention". According to the page, it takes on tasks of different sizes, keeps working while you are away and waits for your approval when it matters. It is powered by Opus 5.5 and is a research preview.

What Anthropic says it does

• Sends a morning brief and flags what needs you in your inbox and calendar, then drafts replies for you to approve.
• Takes on some business-running work, such as finding unpaid invoices and drafting the reminders, preparing payroll for review and getting contracts ready to send.
• Builds a brief, deck or dashboard on request, using apps you connect; the page says it works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins.
• Runs as a standalone app on iOS and Android, and on the web at claude.ai, in one conversation thread that uses your Claude memory, skills and connectors.

The example on the page is a café owner's day: a $640 health-permit fee that the agent asks the owner to approve before paying, and a financial dashboard that refreshes at 5:30 each morning. These are Anthropic's illustrations, not customer results, and the page reports no measured outcomes.

The controls it describes

Anthropic says Duet asks before sensitive operations such as sending messages or paying, that approvals, logins and safety checks run in the user's own cloud computer, and that users can see what it has done and is doing and steer it. The page does not say what counts as sensitive, how long action logs are kept, or whether an administrator can set policy. Those are the questions a security team would ask first.

Anthropic is also candid about the limits. Its FAQ says Duet "may misread a thread or miscalibrate what's urgent" and can miss something that arrives between check-ins.

Who can use it, and what it costs

Duet is on a waitlist for Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet. During the preview it shares your plan's usage limits with the rest of Claude. Anthropic says its background checks count toward those limits and that larger tasks, such as a financial model or a deck, need more model turns and background work. No separate price, limit or token figure is given, which is the number a finance lead would need.

What to do now

Nothing needs changing in a company rollout today, because Duet is not available on business plans. If staff join the waitlist on personal accounts, treat it as shadow IT: decide whether they may connect work email, calendars or credentials, since Anthropic's page does not describe an administrator control. Ask Anthropic, when Team and Enterprise access opens, for the approval rules, the action log and the per-seat cost of background work. Readers on Hacker News raised the same worry about connectors such as a password manager; the Signals page links that thread.