Anthropic opens waitlist for Claude Duet, a proactive agent app for US Pro and Max users

What Anthropic announced

Anthropic announced Claude Duet on October 21, 2026, describing it as a new app in which Claude works as a proactive agent. The company calls it an early research preview and says access is by waitlist, starting with Pro and Max subscribers in the United States. ^[1]

The name "Claude Duet" is the product behind the search term. Anthropic's announcement page and the MacRumors report, published the same day, both describe the launch. ^{[1] [2]}

How it works

According to Anthropic, Duet sends a brief each morning on key items across a user's connected apps, checks accounts every few hours and messages the user only when something needs attention. Users can give it tasks by text or voice in one ongoing thread, and it works in the background on its own virtual machine with its own browser. ^[1]

Anthropic lists scheduling, dashboards, forecasts, prototypes and web apps among the jobs it can handle, and says it works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot and Shopify. Purchases can go through Link, Stripe's digital wallet, using a virtual card, the company says. ^[1]

MacRumors reports that Anthropic is aiming Duet at professionals and small business owners with a lot to track, and that it is built on Opus 5.5. The report frames the product as a competitor to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots agents. ^[2]

Approvals and safety limits

Anthropic says Duet prepares work itself but waits for approval before sending messages, making payments, signing documents or deleting anything. It will not trade securities or move money between accounts even if approved, and users can disconnect any app, the company says. ^[1]

Anthropic says the agent never sees a user's passwords or sign-in tokens and that a dedicated classifier blocks sharing of the most sensitive data, such as card numbers and government IDs. It cites red teams, an external penetration test and a public bug bounty program. ^[1]

The company also lists limits: Duet can misread threads or misjudge urgency, cannot show its browser to the user, and cannot make calls, send texts or reach files on a user's computer. Urgent items can arrive late because it checks at intervals, according to the help center. ^{[1] [3]}

Access, cost and open questions

Duet carries no separate price. It is included in Pro and Max and draws on the same usage limits as the rest of Claude, and Anthropic says background checks and larger tasks count heavily toward them. The help center says Team and Enterprise plans are not yet supported and that access depends on an invitation from the waitlist. ^{[1] [3]}

Accounts of where Duet runs differ. MacRumors says it works on the web and in an iOS app, Anthropic's announcement names iOS, Android and claude.ai, and the help center describes it only as a mobile app for iPhone and Android. This report does not resolve that difference. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Trending Topics reported the same US-only, waitlist structure and noted that Europe is excluded for now. It said early testers cited by the trade publication AlphaSignal described a property viewing booked on the wrong day and a call scheduled shortly before a flight. That detail comes second hand and was not independently checked here. ^[4]

What comes next

Anthropic says a visual storefront editor and 1Password sign-in are coming soon, and that it will share more on its safety approach for Duet. No timetable for wider availability, outside the US or on Team and Enterprise plans, has been published in the sources reviewed. ^{[1] [4]}