Anthropic’s New Claude Duet works while your laptop is off (with approval “brakes” for spend/sign/delete)
Claude ● Covered by 5 sources
Anthropic launched Claude Duet, an app that keeps working while your laptop’s off. It can draft, schedule, and prepare work, but it pauses before spending money or signing anything.
Based on reporting by Claude — read the original for the full story.
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Anthropic has opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app built to act more like a proactive assistant than a chat box. It surfaces what needs attention, keeps moving on tasks in the background, and checks back before it does anything consequential on your behalf.
The product is aimed at professionals and small business owners who are already buried in decisions. Anthropic says Duet is built around Claude Opus 5.5 and starts each day with a short brief on the most important items across connected apps. After that, it keeps watch and pings only when something actually needs a human.
The part that will matter to most users is simple: it does not need your laptop or phone to stay on. Duet runs on a virtual machine with its own browser, so a task can keep going after you walk away. It can handle everything from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, forecasts, prototypes, and web apps. It also works through one ongoing thread, with typing or voice, so a quick question and a weeklong project live in the same place.
Anthropic is also leaning hard on guardrails. Duet never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens, and before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything, it shows the action and waits for approval. Some things stay blocked even with approval, including trading securities and moving money between accounts. A dedicated classifier is meant to stop leaks of the strictest kinds of sensitive data, including credit card numbers and government ID.
The app plugs into more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, Docusign, HubSpot, Canva, Shopify, Link, and Shop Pay. Anthropic says it is also testing how well Duet decides when to interrupt, because checking too often would burn through plan limits faster. For now, the preview is limited to Pro and Max users in the US, and Duet sits in its own app, separate from the main Claude app.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right shape for agent software: useful first, scary second, and only then magical. The approval brakes are doing a lot of work here, which is exactly the point; nobody wants an ambitious chatbot freelancing with payroll. The real test isn’t whether Claude can do more, but whether it can avoid becoming another expensive notification machine with better branding.
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