Anthropic Launches Claude Duet: A Proactive AI Agent for Task Automation

Author: Anthropic Official Team

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

Shenchao Overview: Artificial intelligence is undergoing a historic leap from passive text responses to active autonomous agents. Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Duet completely transforms traditional conversational interaction, not only possessing “context-aware” memory that maintains work context around the clock, but also proactively alerting users to anomalies, coordinating schedules, and performing tasks across software ecosystems without requiring repeated human prompts—marking the arrival of a new intelligent era in which human-machine collaboration evolves from assistant to active partner.

Today, we are officially launching the research preview of Claude Duet, a new application that enables Claude to operate as a proactive agent. It will actively bring matters requiring your attention to your notice, complete tasks entrusted to it, continue working in the background even when you're away from your desk, and seek your confirmation before taking meaningful actions on your behalf. Claude Duet has been specifically designed for busy professionals and small business owners who are stretched thin.

It is available as a standalone app on iOS and Android, and is also同步 provided on the claude.ai website. During this research preview, Claude Duet is included in the Pro and Max plans and shares the same usage allowance as other Claude features. To gain access, apply to join the waitlist.

We designed Claude Duet to be a trusted partner. Professionals across all industries face countless complex decisions every day, and we believe they will find Claude Duet invaluable. It helps you prioritize, clarify where to focus your time and energy, and creates ample space for ambitious projects that once felt overwhelming or impossible to tackle.

The key to Claude Duet’s effectiveness lies in its judgment. We built it around Claude Opus 5.5 to deliver exceptional adaptability and decision-making wisdom, enabling it to accurately determine which tasks require your direct attention, which can be deferred, and when it must first verify with you.

Every morning, it sends you a brief morning briefing summarizing the most critical items from all your connected apps. Throughout the day, it continuously monitors these apps and only messages you when your attention is truly needed. You can also assign it tasks of all kinds—from simple administrative duties like scheduling meetings to advanced, complex workflows such as invoking dozens of tools to build dashboards, generate financial or sales forecasts, create product prototypes, and develop web applications—all handled with ease.

Claude Duet draws on our years of expertise in intelligent agent security, risk control, and privacy, integrating both our own research findings and the infrastructure protection mechanisms essential for enterprise deployment of intelligent agents:

• Claude Duet is built on our high-trust intelligent agent framework, which also provides the core guidance for Claude Code and Claude in Chrome.

• Claude Duet strictly follows the architecture design established for our Claude托管代理, ensuring it never directly accesses or inspects your password or login tokens.

• All actions are reviewed and approved by our automated mode classifier, a security layer that also prevents Claude and Claude Code from performing any unauthorized actions.

• Claude Duet's defense mechanisms against hidden instructions and prompt injection attacks are derived from our browser usage research, with broader coverage provided by our foundational model and security infrastructure.

• We conducted rigorous adversarial testing on Claude Duet’s security infrastructure. A red team, along with third-party external agencies, performed in-depth penetration testing on Claude Duet, and it has been included in our public bug bounty program.

In handling sensitive information, we have deployed a brand-new dedicated classifier and security system prompts alongside the release of Claude Duet to rigorously review every message and prevent any leakage of sensitive data. An intelligent agent capable of reading your emails and sending messages continuously evaluates the flow of information. This new classifier and security prompts are designed to firmly reject any requests to share top-tier sensitive information, such as credit card numbers or government-issued identification. Other sensitive information, such as health data or personal financial status, will only be permitted for transmission when you explicitly instruct us to do so.

We will continue to develop and strengthen these protective measures and share more detailed information about Claude Duet’s security architecture in the coming days.

The internal team at Anthropic has been using Claude Duet to increase productivity while creating more space for deep thinking and personal life. Boris Cherny, head of the Claude Code team, uses voice to walk through his to-do list with Claude Duet during walks, rather than waiting until he’s at his desk. Chelsea Larsson, who leads the model and product behavior design team, hands her to-do list to Claude Duet before leaving work to spend time with her children, allowing it to summarize and deliver completed tasks in her evening report. The behind-the-scenes team building Claude Duet is also using it to develop the product itself: team lead Karan Ahuja collaborates with it to schedule user interviews, refine product prototypes, and even co-deliver and deploy code.

We have provided early access to Claude Duet for small business owners and entrepreneurs, some of whom have already deeply integrated it into their daily operations. Here are some authentic feedback from our testers:

Jess receives Claude Duet’s morning work brief every day. One day, without being prompted, it proactively identified a property viewing scheduled on the wrong date due to a scheduling error. She said, “This is exactly the kind of oversight I want automatically flagged without having to ask.”

Amin operates Shahs of Kabob, a chain restaurant brand with approximately 110 employees in South Florida. He uses Claude Duet to handle accounting, customer support, and marketing, and to reconcile invoices store by store. He says, “It brings everything together—I no longer have to keep over 100 tabs open at once.”

Mya is about to have a business call with a potential client. Claude Duet noticed this scheduling on her calendar and prepared the relevant briefing in advance. It also keenly observed that the call was scheduled right before her flight departure and proactively suggested rescheduling. She remarked, “I hadn’t even realized how close the call was to my flight time. I love this level of initiative.”

The contextual foundation from Claude is the core pillar. Claude Duet seamlessly inherits your long-term memories, custom skills, and connected apps from your Claude account, making initial setup incredibly simple. What changes fundamentally is how you collaborate: Claude Duet proactively approaches you, and you can communicate with it through text or voice within a single, continuous conversation flow—whether it’s a quick response lasting seconds or a complex project spanning a week, everything naturally begins from the same starting point.

Work continues uninterrupted even when you step away. Claude Duet runs on a virtual machine equipped with independent virtual browsers, so your laptop or phone doesn’t need to stay on at all. Simply describe your task in a brief message, and it will autonomously determine which applications to use and what specific steps to execute in the background. You’ll receive an instant notification when the task is complete or when your review is needed.

Receive messages only when truly needed. Claude Duet checks your connected accounts every few hours, as frequent, continuous polling would rapidly exhaust your plan quota. We are continuously refining its logic for determining when to notify you, based on feedback from early testers. You can also customize which types of updates you’d like to track and how often you receive reports.

The ultimate decision-making authority always remains firmly in your hands. Claude Duet will autonomously read, draft, and preprocess tasks—but before sending formal messages, making fund transfers, signing legal documents, or deleting anything, it will clearly present the details of the intended action and wait for your explicit approval. Even with your authorization, certain extremely high-risk operations are strictly prohibited, such as trading securities assets or transferring funds between accounts. You can also revoke Claude Duet’s access to any third-party applications at any time.

Deeply integrated with the ecosystem of tools that drive business operations. Claude Duet can access over 6,000 connectors and plugins from the Claude Marketplace to perform the following actions:

• Fetch missed Gmail emails and key Slack messages, and assist in drafting responses.

Review outstanding invoices in Intuit QuickBooks or Stripe and draft payment reminders.

• Process and run payroll in Gusto, automatically reporting hours, bonuses, and reimbursements.

• Draft the job description, and once you’ve reviewed and confirmed it, publish it directly to LinkedIn.

• Assist in preparing agreement documents and send them via Docusign for review and signing.

Draft follow-up emails based on contact and opportunity interaction history in HubSpot.

• Convert the product launch plan into a complete set of social media promotional materials in Canva.

• Build, design, and manage your Shopify online store. The upcoming rich visual editor will also allow you to visually design and preview your store layout before going live.

You can also use Claude Duet to purchase business essentials via Stripe’s digital wallet, Link. Claude Duet will first confirm the items you wish to purchase, and Link will prompt you to authorize payment. It then completes the transaction using a virtual card, ensuring your actual card details are never exposed. It also supports checkout via Shopify’s Shop Pay on brand-owned e-commerce sites. Upcoming features include, with your permission, the ability to log directly into websites using credentials saved in 1Password.

Figure 2: Ecosystem Overview of Connected Applications Adapted for Claude Duet

This is still an early version of Claude Duet, which may occasionally misinterpret email context or misjudge urgency. We have focused its core capabilities on business productivity scenarios, so personal errands like booking tickets are not yet fully developed, and it currently cannot directly show you its browser operations in real time. Claude Duet runs independently in a dedicated app, isolated from the main Claude application. Insights gained from early users will directly shape how the two will eventually work together in the future.

During the research preview, Claude Duet shares its usage quota with other features in the Claude family, and it consumes quota in a way that differs significantly from typical multi-turn conversations. Background routine status checks contribute to quota usage, while more intensive tasks—such as building financial models or creating presentations—require additional model inference rounds and background autonomous scheduling.

Today, we are initially opening access to Pro and Max users in the United States. Apply to join the waitlist, and we’ll email you as soon as Claude Duet is ready for you.