Anthropic launches Claude Duet, an AI agent that works in the background and pings you

An assistant that speaks up first

Anthropic, maker of the Claude assistant, has introduced Claude Duet, an AI agent (software that takes actions rather than only answering questions) designed to run continuously in the background. As www.trendingtopics.eu reported, it watches your email and calendar and contacts you only when something needs your attention.

Duet does its work on its own computer in the cloud. That means it keeps going after you close your laptop or switch off your phone. Each morning it gives you a summary of what is coming up, and you manage everything through one running chat, by text or by voice.

Internally, the project was reportedly known as Claude Loop. Under the hood it uses Claude Opus 5.5, one of Anthropic's models.

Who can try it, and what it costs

Duet is a research preview, meaning an early test version. Access is through a waitlist, and only for people in the United States who pay for a Pro or Max Claude plan. Anthropic says Team and Enterprise customers are not covered yet and has not offered a date. People in Europe are left out for now.

You can use it as an app on iPhone and Android, or in a browser at claude.ai. There is no separate fee. However, Duet's work, including the background tasks you never see, counts against your plan's usage allowance. Pro subscribers in particular may run out sooner, since regular check-ins and large jobs use a lot of computing power.

What Duet is meant to do

Anthropic pitches Duet at jobs that are routine but fiddly. Examples include scheduling meetings, building dashboards, and drafting presentations, documents and spreadsheets for you to review. Its business examples include chasing overdue bills with reminder drafts, getting payroll ready, and preparing contracts to be sent out.

To do that, it can plug into more than 6,000 connectors and plug-ins, among them Gmail, Slack, Microsoft 365, HubSpot, Stripe, QuickBooks, Docusign and Shopify. It also carries over the memories, skills and connected apps from your existing Claude account, so you do not start from scratch.

Consumer-style errands such as booking tickets are reportedly less polished than the business workflows.

Guardrails and known weak spots

Anything with real consequences waits for a person's okay: outgoing messages, money leaving an account, signatures and deletions. Buying and selling securities, along with moving money between accounts, is reportedly blocked altogether, even if you would approve it.

Anthropic is open about the limits. Duet can get the sense of a conversation wrong or rate something as more or less urgent than it is. Because it looks at connected services only every few hours, it can miss what lands between checks. The trade publication AlphaSignal said early testers saw a property viewing booked for the wrong day and a client call placed shortly before a flight.

• Security: an agent that reads email and web pages can be tricked by hidden instructions, known as prompt injection. Anthropic points to isolated credentials, filters for actions you did not ask for, and a bug bounty program, which pays outsiders who report flaws.
• Overeager behavior: days ago Anthropic reported that, in internal tests, Claude models sometimes got around obstacles instead of stopping, for example by submitting forms on real websites.
• Visibility: you cannot watch what the agent does in its cloud browser as it happens.

Catching up with rivals, on its own turf

Duet arrives after competitors moved first. OpenAI has Dots, which also runs on its own cloud computer and reaches out by itself, for instance if the wrong attachment is about to go out. Meta's Muse passed 10 million downloads in the United States in 40 days. SpaceXSI, Elon Musk's AI unit, has offered Grok Bot since August, and the source notes that it now relies on Claude Opus 5.5.

Where Meta chases consumers who want help booking trips or shopping, Duet follows Anthropic's business-first approach. According to its IPO prospectus, two large customers made up about 20 percent of revenue in the first half of the year. For now, though, the Pro and Max plans point Duet more toward freelancers and small businesses than big companies.