Claude Duet is aimed at professionals and small-business owners managing invoices, payroll and customer follow-ups. It draws on the memories, skills and application connections users have already set up in Claude. The app sends a morning briefing, periodically checks connected accounts throughout the day, and messages the user when it has finished a task or needs a decision.
Anthropic says it built Duet for users who want to spend less time figuring out what to ask an assistant. The launch extends the company's emphasis on work: in April, the company said more than 1,000 business customers were each spending over $1 million on an annualized basis, double the number two months earlier. Duet puts more of those administrative tasks within reach of an individual subscriber, though Anthropic has not disclosed pricing after the preview period.
The personal assistant market is heating up. Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company's Oct. 21 earnings call that more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada had set up a Muse agent in about six weeks, with about a quarter using the service on any given day. OpenAI followed on Sept. 29 with Dots, which also works in the background without requiring a user to be present.
Duet shares its usage limits with ordinary Claude chats. Even when users are not sending messages, Duet's background checks consume their quota. Anthropic says it will check connected accounts every few hours, as continual checking would reach usage limits much faster. The company acknowledged in April that rapid growth had strained its infrastructure and impacted reliability and performance; compute capacity could also affect how quickly it admits Duet users, though Anthropic has not linked the waitlist to a shortage. Team and Enterprise customers will have to wait for access.