Anthropic has announced Claude Duet, a new AI agent intended for professionals and small businesses that promises to help manage daily life.
Amid competition from Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, Anthropic on Wednesday said Claude Duet will track your messages and tasks, surfacing what it deems important, and complete tasks it’s asked to perform. It’s designed to operate without supervision, but will reportedly seek permission before acting on the user’s behalf.
Anthropic says you can describe a task to Duet in a short message, and it’ll figure out which apps to use and the steps to take in the background. You’ll be notified when the task is done or if there’s something you need to know.
Some of the examples provided by Anthropic include:
-
Replying to missed Gmail and Slack messages
-
Run payroll using Gusto
-
Draft reminders for unpaid invoices found in Intuit QuickBooks or Stripe.
-
Draft a job posting, seek user approval, and post it to LinkedIn
-
Build a social campaign for product launches using Canva
-
Set up and manage a Shopify store
But Anthropic says there are still guardrails. User approval is required before it sends messages, makes payments, signs documents, or deletes files. And even with user approval, Claude Duet won’t perform tasks like trading securities or moving money between accounts.
Claude Duet is built around Claude Opus 5.5, and because it runs on a virtual machine, the user’s computer or phone doesn’t have to be on for it to operate.
Claude Duet is available on iOS, Android, and claude.ai for users of Anthropic’s Pro and Max plans. It will share subscribers’ existing Claude usage limit. Currently in research mode, interested users can join a waitlist for access.
AI agents like Duet, Muse, and Dots have been immensely popular this year. For example, Meta’s Muse has already been downloaded 10 million times in less than two months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Wednesday. But in that short time, the app has been beset with controversy, including reportedly creating files on users’ friends and loved ones and sending a Facebook Marketplace buyer to a user’s home.
Want more tech and digital culture news delivered to your inbox daily or sent straight to your device? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts today.
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/anthropic-claude-duet-announced
