Anthropic is joining Meta and OpenAI in the race to build AI assistants that keep working when their users step away, with a new app aimed at professionals and small-business owners.
Called Claude Duet, the app can check emails and calendars, draft replies and follow up on unfinished work. Anthropic announced it Wednesday as a research preview. The idea is to let an assistant check connected accounts for tasks such as unpaid invoices and draft reminders without waiting for a prompt, so users spend less time figuring out what to ask for.
Personal assistants bring together information from users’ email, calendars and other apps, remember their preferences and act across those services. That could make them the first place users turn when they need something done. Without its own personal assistant, Anthropic might lose those daily interactions to competing products from Meta and OpenAI—even if users might prefer Anthropic’s Claude.
Anthropic says it built Duet for professionals and small-business owners, including those managing invoices, payroll and customer follow-ups. That audience extends the company’s emphasis on work: in April, Anthropic 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 hasn’t disclosed what it will charge for the assistant after the preview period.
Duet draws on the memories, skills and application connections users have already set up in Claude. It sends a morning briefing, checks connected accounts throughout the day, and messages the user when it has finished a task or needs a decision.
Muse, Dots—and now Duet
OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta are now locked in a race to get agentic AI assistants in front of users.
Anthropic has been building towards integrating Claude with enterprise tools for months. Its Claude Tag tool, introduced in June, can follow Slack discussions and check back on unresolved tasks. In September, Anthropic updated Claude to combine chat with Cowork and keep working on assignments after users closed their laptops.
Still, Duet arrives in a market where Meta’s Muse, launched Sept. 8, has already attracted millions of downloads. On Meta’s Oct. 21 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada had set up a Muse agent in about six weeks. About a quarter use the service on any given day, he said.
OpenAI followed on Sept. 29 with Dots, which can also work in the background without requiring a user to be present.
Anthropic’s launch of Duet may be partly defensive, giving Claude Pro and Max users a way to hand off more of their daily tasks without switching to a rival’s assistant.
Still, Duet shares its usage limits with ordinary Claude chats. Even when users aren’t sending messages, Duet’s background checks eat into their quota. Anthropic says it’ll check connected accounts every few hours, as continual checking would reach usage limits much faster.
Anthropic 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 hasn’t linked the waitlist to a shortage. Team and Enterprise customers will also have to wait for access.
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