Claude Duet: what Anthropic’s AI agent can do and who it’s for

Claude Duet can review your work email, draft replies, prepare meeting materials, and let you know when it needs a decision from you. It keeps working in the cloud after you close the app, and its morning review of your inbox and calendar helps identify what needs your attention.

Anthropic introduced Duet on October 21, 2026. It is currently a research preview available through a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers in the US, so it is not yet officially available in Ukraine. Anthropic intends the agent to take on some of the daily work involved in managing email, meetings, and documents.

How Claude Duet works

Using Claude Duet feels like using a messaging app: you type or send a voice message in the main conversation, with separate channels available for different topics. The agent uses Claude Opus 5.5, along with the memory, skills, and connected services from your Claude account. You do not need to set them up again, and shared memory helps it carry context from one task to the next.

Each morning, it reviews your email and calendar to prepare a daily brief, then checks your connected accounts every few hours throughout the day. You can also give it a task directly, such as researching a company or preparing a presentation. You do not need to leave your computer or phone on, because the agent works on its own computer in the cloud.

The Tasks tab shows work in progress and requests that need your input, while finished materials appear in Make. You can review and edit briefs, financial models, presentations, and dashboards. When Duet provides figures or summaries, it identifies the email, file, or spreadsheet the information came from.

How Claude Duet differs from a regular chat

In a regular conversation, you decide when to ask Claude for help, what information to give it, and what to do with its response. Duet checks your connected services at regular intervals and can flag something that needs attention or start preparing materials on its own. The main difference is that it can keep working between your messages.

The standard Claude chat can also draft emails and create presentations. What matters with Duet is how well it spots relevant events and draws on your email, calendar, and documents without being prompted each time. That is where it could reduce the amount of work you need to check manually.

What you can ask Duet to do

An agent like this is likely to be most useful when a task involves several services. Preparing for a meeting, for example, may require previous email exchanges, company research, and details from your calendar.

• Prepare for a meeting: research the company, review previous emails, and put together a list of questions. Tell it who you are meeting and what you want to find out.
• Follow up on unpaid invoices: check your connected QuickBooks or Stripe account and draft customer reminders for you to review before sending.
• Create a document: use the available materials to produce a research brief, financial model, or presentation, then give you a file to review and edit.

In its announcement, Anthropic describes how Claude Duet prepared a brief for a user’s meeting with a prospective client, noticed that the meeting was scheduled just before her flight, and suggested rescheduling it.

You can connect Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and other services, including Slack, HubSpot, and Docusign. If a website has no connector, Duet can open it in its own cloud browser. Some integrations have limits: Microsoft 365 is not yet available, for example, and not all Slack features are supported.

How to give it a task and review the result

Suppose you have a meeting tomorrow with a client you have already been emailing. Specify which meeting you mean, where Duet should look for information, and what you want it to prepare. For example:

“Prepare a short brief for tomorrow’s meeting with Company N. Cover what we have already agreed on by email, what remains unresolved, and what we should discuss. Use emails from the past month and documents in my connected Google Drive. Include a source link for each agreed point.”

Specifying the sources, time frame, and output format makes it easier to check whether the task is complete: did it include the latest email, use the current document version, and draw conclusions that the sources actually support?

You can follow progress in Tasks and give further instructions while the work is underway, such as narrowing the brief’s scope or asking Duet to focus on a particular issue. It may suggest that a task looks finished, but only you can mark it as completed.

What Duet handles on its own and what needs your approval

Duet can read materials and prepare drafts on its own. It is designed to show you the planned action and ask for approval before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document, or deleting data. If you cannot respond right away, it can continue with other parts of the task and bring the request back to you later.

Duet also supports purchases through Stripe’s Link and Shopify’s Shop Pay. With Link, for example, payment uses a one-time virtual card restricted to a specific merchant and amount, so neither the agent nor the merchant receives your actual card number. Each purchase requires separate approval.

Some actions are off-limits even with your approval, including trading securities, transferring money between bank accounts, and accessing someone else’s account. Duet cannot yet make phone calls or send text messages to other people.

Who can use Duet and what are its limitations?

According to the official help page, access to Claude Duet requires a Pro or Max plan, a Claude account in the US, and an invitation from the waitlist. The research preview is not yet available on Team or Enterprise plans. Duet has dedicated iOS and Android apps and a web interface. It is included at no extra cost during the research preview.

Background checks count toward your Claude plan’s usage limits. An agent that regularly checks email and handles complex tasks may therefore use up your allowance sooner than chat alone.

• Checks happen at intervals: an urgent message may arrive between checks and go unnoticed until the next one.
• No view of the browser session yet: during the research preview, you cannot watch the agent work in its browser or take over the browser yourself.
• It can misjudge priorities: the agent may misunderstand an email thread or how urgent something is, so you need to review its work and proposed actions.

Access to your Claude account does not give Duet access to everything on your computer: it cannot open files stored only on your device, and its access to Claude projects is limited. Before assigning a task that depends on a particular document, check that the agent can open it through a connected service.

If you would like to run your own agent on a computer or VPS, we have a step-by-step OpenClaw setup guide.

What to consider before connecting your email

According to Anthropic’s security overview, the model does not see your passwords or authentication tokens. However, the agent does read the emails and documents you give it access to, since it needs them to carry out your requests. Before connecting a service, check which emails and documents it will be able to access.

An email from someone else or a web page may contain instructions intended to steer the agent into following another person’s commands, such as forwarding data to a different recipient. This is known as prompt injection. Anthropic uses separate checks on actions and outgoing messages but acknowledges that these defenses are not foolproof. Before approving a message, check the recipient, text, and attachments.

If you use the same email for crypto exchanges

Email access is especially sensitive for crypto holders because exchanges send login codes, password reset links, and withdrawal confirmations to your inbox. We recommend using a separate email account for exchanges and keeping it disconnected from AI agents. You can use a different account for work email and Duet tasks.

Protect your email and exchange accounts with a FIDO2 security key wherever supported. It protects sign-ins against phishing, but it does not revoke permissions you have already granted to an agent. Keep your seed phrase in an offline backup, away from emails and documents that cloud services can read.

We stock the YubiKey 5 NFC with USB-A and the YubiKey 5C NFC with USB-C. Both support FIDO2/WebAuthn and NFC; the right choice depends on your devices and the service’s support for security keys.

Who is Duet likely to suit?

We think Claude Duet will appeal most to people whose work revolves around email, calendars, and documents: business owners, small-team managers, and professionals coordinating several projects or client relationships at once. In that setting, the agent can draw on related information across services to prepare materials and reminders. If you mainly use Claude for occasional questions and do not plan to connect other services, Duet may offer little extra value.