Anthropic Launches Claude Duet AI Agent — SkimNews
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- Anthropic launched Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent built on Claude Opus 5.5, as a "research preview" aimed at professionals and small business owners, positioning it against Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
- Claude Duet is available on iOS, Android, and the web, and sends users a morning brief on connected apps, monitors those apps throughout the day, and can execute tasks ranging from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, financial or sales forecasts, prototypes, and web apps.
- The agent runs on a virtual machine with a browser, draws on Claude's memory, skills, and connected apps, and messages the user for approval before sensitive actions like sending payments or deleting data.
- Anthropic equipped Claude Duet with a new dedicated classifier and safety system prompt designed to reject requests to share the strictest tier of sensitive information, including credit card numbers.
- Anthropic acknowledged Claude Duet is an "early version" that may misread a thread or miscalibrate what's urgent, and is not yet as strong at personal errands like booking tickets.
- Access is gated to Pro or Max subscribers in the US, with prospective users required to join a waitlist.
Why it matters: Claude Duet enters a crowded agent market with explicit safety guardrails — an approval step before payments and deletions, plus a new classifier for the strictest tier of sensitive data — but Anthropic itself labels it an "early version" prone to misreading threads. The US-only, waitlisted rollout behind a Pro or Max paywall means Anthropic ships a deliberately limited product while Meta and OpenAI push wider releases.
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