Anthropic launches Claude Duet, an agent app for professionals and small businesses
The app works on users' own data and asks for approval before any payment, so it is a narrower kind of agent than the errand-running tools in the field.
Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, an agent app pitched at professionals and small businesses, entering a crowded field that includes offerings from Meta, OpenAI and others. Rather than running errands or booking tickets, Duet produces daily briefings, builds dashboards and suggests actions from a user's data, and it can carry out tasks in its own virtual machine in the background, returning when it needs approval. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and connects to more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace, and it can make online purchases through Stripe's Link or Shopify's Shop Pay, though payments need user sign-off and it will not trade securities or move money between accounts. A new classifier screens messages for sensitive information leaking out, and by default the agent declines requests for credit card numbers and government ID. Duet is available on iOS, Android and Claude.ai for Pro and Max subscribers in research preview, with access through a waitlist.
Why it matters
Duet puts an agent into the daily work of professionals and small business owners, handling briefings, dashboards and suggested actions from their own data. Its limits are set by design: it runs tasks in a background virtual machine and returns for approval, it will not trade securities or move money between accounts, and it declines requests for card numbers and government ID by default. For readers following the field, the notable point is that Anthropic is betting on agents that act on information and purchases only with user sign-off, while access is still limited to a waitlist in research preview.
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