Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet on October 21, an assistant that checks connected apps and works while you're away. Its background activity draws from the same usage allowance as your other Claude work. That makes the frequency of those checks part of the cost of handing it a task.
Access starts with a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers in the United States. Team and Enterprise plans aren't included yet, according to the product FAQ. This is reporting from Anthropic's announcement and documentation; we haven't tested Duet or measured its usage.
Checking in consumes capacity
Duet runs on a virtual machine with its own browser, so your device can be off while it works. Anthropic says it checks connected accounts every few hours because continuous checking would exhaust plan limits faster. Users can specify what they want to hear about and how often, the announcement says.
The FAQ confirms that background checks count toward shared limits, while larger assignments require more model turns. For a subscriber, the practical question is how much capacity remains for other work after those checks. These pages provide no per-check allowance or task-by-task consumption figures, so they don't establish how much headroom a particular workflow needs.
Preparing work and approving actions
Anthropic says Duet waits for approval before sending messages or making payments. Its announcement also puts signing documents and deleting items behind approval, while securities trading and transfers between accounts remain prohibited even with permission. That gives readers a specific boundary to check when evaluating its behavior.
The product page describes work such as finding unpaid invoices and drafting reminders, with outputs ready for review. It also warns that Duet may misread a thread, misjudge urgency or miss an item between checks. If you try the preview, a draft reminder is a more inspectable first assignment than relying on it to catch every overdue payment.
Anthropic promises more safety details in the coming days. Watch for those disclosures and measurements of complete tasks, including background usage. Approval prompts describe when a person must intervene; the preview still needs evidence of how reliably Duet identifies the work that needs that intervention.