Claude Duet, Anthropic's agent, opens U.S. waitlist

Anthropic opened a waitlist Wednesday for Claude Duet, an agent that keeps working with the phone turned off. Only Pro and Max subscribers in the United States can join.

Duet is a separate app, for iOS, Android and claude.ai, built on Claude Opus 5.5. It runs on a virtual machine with its own browser: every few hours it checks connected accounts, sends a morning summary and writes only when something needs attention. It costs nothing extra, but its background checks draw on the same usage quota as the rest of Claude.

It reads and drafts on its own. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes something, it shows the action and waits for the user's approval. Trading securities and moving money between accounts are blocked even if the user approves. It connects with more than 6,000 services, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot and Shopify.

All of that is Anthropic's claim: no one outside the company has yet measured its performance. According to the company, the agent has no direct access to passwords or access tokens, a classifier stops it from sending data such as card or government ID numbers, and red teams and an outside firm tested it.

Dan Shipper of Every, who used it with early access, pointed to a gap: "There's no real voice mode yet, just transcription." Anthropic itself admits Duet can misjudge the urgency of a message.

The product follows Dots, the personal agent OpenAI introduced in September, and Muse, a similar one from Meta. The race is no longer about the chatbot that answers when asked but about the agent that watches a user's email and billing and acts on their behalf.

Anthropic has not yet explained how it stores and retains data from connected apps. It promised more security details "in the coming days."