Anthropic launched Claude Duet, a proactive agent for Pro and Max subscribers: Reveneau

Why it mattersA proactive agent that counts against a chat subscription's usage limits is a different cost shape than a chat window, and a team authorizing Claude Duet to touch Slack, Gmail or Stripe is handing it the kinds of permissions that are hard to narrow after the fact.

Anthropic has started letting Claude come to you. The company opened a research preview of Claude Duet, pitched as "a proactive agent that understands what needs your attention". It runs as a separate app on iOS, Android and claude.ai, powered by Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model.

Anthropic's own words on the product page say Duet "comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working even when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf". The practical difference from the main Claude.ai is direction of travel. Claude.ai waits for a prompt; Duet opens with a morning briefing of what it thinks is important, acts on the tasks you hand it by message and asks for approval before anything sensitive.

Who can use it today

The research preview is open to US Pro and Max subscribers through a waitlist. There is no separate price. Duet shares the usage limits of the existing Pro or Max plan it sits under, and Anthropic says explicitly that background checks "count toward those limits", so an agent running in the background costs the same model turns a conversation does. Complex tasks need more turns than a typical chat.

The point to take seriously is the plan math. If a Max plan's budget was built around chat sessions and a few prompts a day, a proactive agent that scans the morning for actionable items and then runs tasks will use that budget faster and on a different pattern. Teams considering Duet should model that before adding it to a workflow.

What it can touch

Anthropic lists more than 6,000 connectors and plugins reachable from Duet, through the Claude Marketplace. Stripe, Gmail, Slack and Notion are named on the page. Memory is on; the product page writes that Duet remembers prior context across conversations. Anthropic also says approvals and security checks "run in your own cloud computer, so sensitive details stay private".

The connector list is the surface that matters. An agent granted Gmail access can read mail. One granted Stripe access can read invoices. One granted both can summarise your billing against your calendar. Granting a connector is the moment to decide what role the agent plays, because narrowing it later means revoking and reauthorising. Anthropic's own description leaves that scoping to the user and the connector.

Where this fits in the agent market this week

The announcement lands alongside Meta's Muse, which has had an uneven week of its own, and Walmart opening a sanctioned agent channel in the same hours. Anthropic positions Duet as an agent for an individual's work rather than a shopping or browsing agent, with Marketplace connectors doing the integration rather than a built-in browser. The product page states no end date for the research preview and no plan to raise the price, both of which can change.

For a team already paying for Max for engineers, this is one more call to count against the account. Measure a week of Duet use before expanding it, decide which connectors to grant, and keep the review of its background actions on by default.

Source

Anthropic: Introducing Claude Duet. Context article: Anthropic Help Center: Claude Duet.

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