Overview
- Anthropic announced a research preview of Claude Duet on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, opening a staged waitlist that grants access only to Pro and Max subscribers in the United States.
- The agent runs on the Opus 5.5 model in its own cloud virtual machine so it can keep working when a device is off and surface a daily brief and items that need attention.
- Claude Duet uses more than 6,000 connectors from the Claude Marketplace and supports payment flows such as Stripe Link and Shop Pay to automate business tasks like invoicing and purchases with user approval.
- Anthropic says Duet will request sign‑off before sending messages, making payments, signing documents, or deleting data and that a dedicated safety classifier and system prompt will block the strictest data exposures, though the company warns Duet can misread threads and misjudge urgency.
- Access is intentionally limited during the preview: background checks and unattended work count against existing plan usage limits and Team or Enterprise availability has not been scheduled, a constraint that could speed consumption of paid plan capacity as the agent runs continuously.