Claude Duet keeps working after you close your laptop

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Anthropic has announced Claude Duet, an assistant that can pick up work without waiting for a fresh prompt. It checks your connected apps, briefs you in the morning and carries on with tasks while you are away. Access starts today through a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers in the US. 1

The pitch is easy to understand if your day disappears into email, meetings and all the little jobs between them. Duet is meant to notice what needs doing, prepare the work and bring you the decisions. Whether it gets those interruptions right will probably matter as much as how much work it finishes.

Its own computer, your existing Claude context

Duet runs on a virtual machine with its own browser, so your phone or laptop does not need to stay on. It uses Opus 5.5 and brings across the memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account. You talk to it by voice or text in one ongoing thread. There are standalone iOS and Android apps, plus access on claude.ai. 1 2

Anthropic says it can handle jobs ranging from arranging meetings and chasing invoices to building dashboards, forecasts and web apps. Its examples draw on the Claude Marketplace’s more than 6,000 connectors and plugins, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto and Shopify. Those are the company’s launch examples; we have not tested Duet ourselves. 1

One example in the announcement gets the idea across better than a long feature list: an early tester had a client call just before a flight. Duet noticed the clash, prepared a brief and offered to move the call. That is the sort of small catch that could make an assistant worth keeping around. 1

The background work comes out of your plan

Duet is included in Pro and Max during the preview, but it shares their existing usage limits. Checking apps and working through larger tasks both count. It checks connected accounts every few hours rather than continuously, partly to avoid burning through that allowance. You can tell it what deserves a notification and how often to contact you. 1

That leaves a practical question for early users: how much ordinary Claude use is left after Duet has spent the day checking accounts and working on projects? Anthropic has explained the trade-off, but the announcement does not give a simple daily task allowance.

It still has to ask before sending

Anthropic says Duet can read, draft and prepare work on its own. Sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting something requires your approval first. Securities trading and moving money between accounts are off-limits even with permission. The company also describes checks intended to prevent sensitive information from being sent to the wrong place. 1

There are some rough edges at launch. Anthropic warns that Duet may misread a conversation or judge urgency badly, and says personal errands are less developed than work tasks. It also cannot yet show you its browser. For now, anyone wanting to try it needs to join the research-preview waitlist. 1