Anthropic Launches Claude Duet Personal AI Agent, Joining xAI, Meta and OpenAI in Assistant Race

Anthropic released Claude Duet, a standalone personal AI agent powered by its Claude Opus 5.5 model, opening a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers in the U.S. The product runs tasks autonomously in a cloud environment with a dedicated virtual machine and browser, freeing users from keeping devices on or staying in a chat interface. Duet connects to more than 6,000 tools through an official marketplace spanning email, messaging, accounting, payroll, HR, CRM, e-commerce and e-signature workflows. It requires human approval before sending messages, making payments or deleting data, and bars high-risk actions including securities trading and cross-account transfers. The agent shares usage limits with existing Claude accounts. The launch follows xAI's Grok Bot on August 11, Meta Platforms' (META-US) Muse on September 8 and OpenAI's Dots on September 29, as competition shifts from model capability to control of the personal AI assistant entry point. Anthropic said Duet remains in early research preview, with limited visibility into in-progress tasks and occasional errors in reading context or judging urgency. Duet will roll out to U.S. subscribers in stages.