Anthropic Launches Claude Duet, a Proactive Agent Powered by Opus 5.5

The Claude version of "dot" is finally here!

Tonight, Anthropic officially announced the launch of Claude Duet, a "proactive Agent" powered by Opus 5.5.

The first batch is opening a waitlist to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US, usable only after being invited, with support for iOS, Android, and the web.

Duet can be seen as a 24/7 always-on AI: before you even open your computer, it has already updated your Series A roadshow deck.

It has even prepared what investors might follow up with and how you should answer.

By the time the boss Maya picks up her phone, the screen shows just one line: "5 things in progress, 2 need you."

It also keeps an eye on the workflow itself, autonomously judging which tasks are most urgent, then takes the work over and finishes it.

Claude Duet is here to start being that AI partner who "doesn't need to be nagged and questioned every day."

On launch day, OpenAI's Tibo showed up in the comments, introducing his own Dot and Duet to each other and telling them to "get along well."

Grok Bot, Muse, Dots, and now Duet have all arrived one after another. Four giants all want to deliver an AI that can keep working to your side.

Beyond the chat box, a race to capture the entire workday has begun.

Claude Duet debuts: AI takes the initiative to take on work

After OpenAI unveiled dot at its developer day, Anthropic could no longer sit still.

The all-new Claude Duet is their strongest weapon.

While you're away for the weekend, it keeps a close eye on your Slack messages; when you close your laptop, it's still racing through tasks in the cloud. The workflows of workers worldwide officially hit a historic watershed today.

First, let's look at a round of official demos, starring the aforementioned Maya, who is busy fundraising.

She is the owner of the coffee brand Marlo. The new Chicago store opens in 26 days, and she has an investor meeting on Thursday, with hiring, renewals, and customer complaints piling up.

Duet puts all of these into a morning briefing, laying out progress, blockers, and the places that need her sign-off.

The store-opening checklist has 41 items, and today the only one that must get her nod is the health permit. The form is already filled out, the $640 fee awaits her approval in Link, and then Duet will continue with the inspection application.

Maya finds the deck too cramped, so Duet splits one page into two. The fundraising materials are missing 3 documents; it fills in 2 of them, and the remaining board minutes await her signature.

Maya also asks it to build a daily business dashboard. Duet pulls POS, Shopify, CRM, customer service, payroll, and bank data into Marlo Pulse and sets it to refresh at 5:30 every morning.

It also notices that after a shipping-fee change, the subscription churn rate rose from 2.6% to 3.4%, and proactively proposes investigating the cause and trying free shipping over $40. Maya replies with three words: "Make it happen."

Actions like sending messages, making payments, signing documents, and deleting content are, by product design, all shown to the user for approval. Buying and selling securities, transferring between accounts, and accessing other people's accounts are things that are not allowed even with approval.

In the official hiring demo, Nicole selects Jenn, and Duet retrieves the compensation package from the HR folder and attaches it to the offer email. She asks for a warmer ending, it revises it, and then waits for her to click "Send."

Anthropic also invited a group of small business owners to try it early. In the officially published cases, Duet has already started finding the things they tend to miss when busy.

Real estate agent Jess Provencher didn't ask it to check her calendar; Duet discovered on its own that a showing was booked on the wrong day. That's exactly the kind of help she wants: finding the mistake before she even says anything.

Amin Ebrahimi, owner of the South Florida barbecue chain Shahs of Kabob, manages about 110 employees.

He uses Duet for accounting, customer service, and marketing, and also has it go through invoices store by store. "I don't have to open 100 tabs anymore."

Brand strategist Mya Dalton had a client call right next to her flight departure and hadn't noticed. While preparing the pre-meeting brief, Duet spotted the conflict and proactively proposed rescheduling.

Opus 5.5: autonomously judging when to reach you

The more tasks there are, the more another skill of Duet is tested: when to keep working, and when to interrupt the boss.

Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and now at Anthropic Labs, says Opus 5.5 is their first model with enough judgment to act proactively in the right way.

Anthropic has also equipped Duet with its own cloud virtual machine and browser, where tasks run, so you can turn off your computer and phone.

When it encounters a website with no ready-made connector, it can also try operating it through the browser.

Moreover, Claude Duet perfectly inherits all the assets in your existing Claude account.

Long-term memory, custom skills, and all authorized third-party apps in Claude are seamlessly migrated to Duet with one click.

No tedious initialization setup is needed. The first second you open Duet, it is already a "veteran employee" who knows your tone of voice and understands your project background.

According to the official introduction, Duet can use more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude app marketplace to advance work across systems.

For example, it can check unpaid invoices in Stripe, prepare dunning letters, fill in payroll data with Gusto, and then prepare agreements through Docusign and send them for signature. Steps that were originally scattered across different software are now being carried forward by the same Agent.

Background checks are usually performed every few hours, and morning briefings and tasks also consume the existing plan quota. Access is still limited in scope, Slack functionality is limited, and Microsoft 365 is not yet supported.

Duet is currently open to a waitlist for Pro and Max users in the United States, with no extra charge during the research preview.

The father of Claude Code can't stop playing with it

People at Anthropic have already incorporated Duet into their own workdays.

Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, recites his mental to-do list to Duet while taking a walk. He keeps walking, and the work has already been handed off.

Chelsea Larsson, who leads model and product behavior design at Anthropic, hands her to-do list to Duet and goes to spend time with her children. By evening, Duet compiles the results into a report for her to review.

After using it for a few weeks, Mike Krieger is already comfortable letting Duet watch his weekend Slack while he goes offline to rest. In a demo he shared, the request was also simple: leave routine matters until Monday, and only call him if something urgent comes up.

On Saturday afternoon, a notification arrived: someone in the #evals-launch channel @-mentioned him, and this matter needed attention, while everything else could wait until Monday. Moving all messages to a phone is easy; what shows judgment is helping someone filter out the one message worth interrupting the weekend for.

Mike also mentioned in the original post that Duet proactively reminded him that Neal Stephenson had a new book out. He then asked it to buy the book for him, and it placed an order with a local bookstore.

Karan Ahuja, the head of the Duet team, even uses Duet to develop Duet. From scheduling user interviews and building prototypes together to submitting code, it has been involved throughout.

He called it the happiest and most meaningful experience of his career.

On X, people who received early access also began sharing feedback. On October 21, AI creator Peter Yang posted a hands-on video, listing proactivity as the top highlight and saying that Artifacts could become a unique advantage for Duet.

Peter also brought the use case into his home. In the video, he showed an "AI Exploration Club" that he had Duet make for his child; clicking into the page reveals a set of interactive tasks for getting to know chatbots, practicing asking questions, and protecting privacy.

Jen, who is responsible for agent payment products at Stripe, tested it more like a small business. She and her team imagined they ran a one-person candy company and asked Duet, together with Link, to find suppliers and purchase candy.

In her post that day, she wrote, "It actually did it!" This test pushed Duet from organizing materials to finding sources of supply.

Some people have also encountered specific limitations. Wiley Strahan, who participated in the preview, reported under Peter's post that he could only establish three connections in the Google environment, which is not enough for people with multiple Gmail accounts.

71 days, four giants competing for one entry point

From Grok Bot entering testing on August 11 to Muse launching on September 8, Dots releasing on September 29, and then Duet appearing on October 21, only 71 days had passed.

Amol Avasare, head of growth at Anthropic, is already envisioning a daily life in which work is handled first and then delivered to people, waiting for approval or revision.

Your screen goes dark, but its workday continues.

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