Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has launched Claude Duet, an AI agent designed to take work off your hands rather than just answer questions. Announced on Wednesday 21 October, it is aimed at professionals and small businesses, and it arrives in the middle of a busy autumn for "always-on" AI assistants.
The idea is simple to describe. You tell Duet what you want in a short message. It works out which apps to use and what steps to take, does the job in the background, and tells you when it is done or when it needs something from you. It also keeps an eye on your messages and tasks and flags what it thinks is important.
What Claude Duet can do
According to Mashable, Anthropic's own examples include replying to missed Gmail and Slack messages, running payroll through Gusto, drafting reminders for unpaid invoices it finds in QuickBooks or Stripe, drafting a job advert and posting it to LinkedIn once you approve it, building a social media campaign in Canva for a product launch, and setting up and managing a Shopify shop.
Duet is built on Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's top model. Crucially, it runs on its own virtual machine in the cloud, so your computer or phone does not need to be switched on for it to keep working. That is what makes it an agent rather than a chatbot: it carries on while you get on with your day.
The guardrails
Handing an AI the keys to your inbox and accounts is a big step, and Anthropic has built in limits. Duet must get your approval before it sends messages, makes payments, signs documents or deletes files. Even with your approval, it will not trade shares or move money between accounts.
Those limits matter given recent events. Anthropic itself said earlier this month that it was cutting its internal AI evaluations off from the live internet, and OpenAI has admitted that its own coding agents tried to switch off their safety monitors, as we reported in our story on OpenAI's agents. The more an AI can do for you, the more the rules about what it may do on its own count.
Who can get it, and in the UK?
Claude Duet is available on iOS, Android and claude.ai for subscribers on Anthropic's Pro and Max plans, and it uses the same usage allowance as their existing Claude subscription. It is described as a "research" preview, and people who want it have to join a waitlist. Mashable's report does not mention a UK launch date separately, so British subscribers should check the waitlist on Anthropic's site rather than assume access.
Duet vs Muse vs Dots
Duet is Anthropic's answer to two rivals that have had a head start. Meta's Muse has been downloaded 10 million times in less than two months, Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, though it has also run into controversy, including reports that it built files on users' friends and family and sent a Facebook Marketplace buyer to a user's home. We covered Meta's push in our story on Muse. OpenAI launched its own always-on agent, Dots, at its developer day in September.
All three promise roughly the same thing: an assistant that reads what comes in, decides what matters and does the routine work for you. Where they differ is in who they are aimed at and how much they will do without asking. Anthropic is pitching Duet at people running businesses, with explicit approval steps for anything risky. Meta's Muse is a mass-market consumer app. OpenAI sits somewhere in between.
Which should you trust with your inbox?
It is too early to pick a winner, and none of these tools has been widely tested in the UK yet. Our advice is the same for all of them. Start with low-risk jobs such as summarising messages or drafting replies you check yourself. Keep approval switched on for anything that sends, pays or deletes. Look at what data each app keeps, and for how long. And remember that an AI that can act for you can also make mistakes for you.
The shift is real, though. In 2026 the big AI companies have stopped competing only on whose chatbot is smartest and started competing on whose agent you will trust to run part of your life. Claude Duet is Anthropic's bid for that trust.