Yesterday Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a standalone app where Claude works as a proactive agent, powered by Claude Opus 5.5. Reuters framed it as Anthropic answering OpenAI and Meta in the race to build agents that finish work on your behalf. That’s accurate, and it’s also underselling the part I care about.
What Duet does differently
Duet scans your connected work apps, sends you a morning brief, and keeps working on its own cloud computer even after your phone and laptop go dark. Open your day and the briefing is already there: a customer who never got a reply, an invoice past due, a meeting that collides with a flight. Duet doesn’t just flag them. It drafts the customer response, finds the unpaid invoice, and proposes the calendar change. You review. You approve. Done.
It checks connected apps every few hours instead of sitting idle between prompts, and it reaches more than 6,000 connectors and plugins through the Claude Marketplace. The morning brief is the product. Everything else is plumbing for it.
Why proactive is the whole game
Every agent I’ve written about lately, OpenAI’s dots, xAI’s Grok Bot, my own self-hosted Hermes, shares one bet: the future is agents that act before you ask. Duet is the most disciplined version of that bet from a major lab. It doesn’t promise to run your company. It promises to read your business every morning and hand you a list of decisions. That’s a scope a small-business owner can actually say yes to.
The Anthropic pattern
This is who Anthropic has been all year: last to the party, best dressed. They watched dots and Meta’s Muse establish the category, then shipped the version aimed squarely at professionals and small businesses rather than developers. Late is a strategy when the thing you ship after everyone else is the one normal people can use.
The caveats
It’s a research preview, so expect limits on accounts, regions, and connectors. An agent that reads your inbox, your calendar, and your invoices is an agent you should audit for the first two weeks, no matter whose logo is on it. And proactive agents spend proactively; check what the checks cost.
My take
The agent war now has four credible uniforms: dots for the ChatGPT crowd, Grok Bot for the build-your-own-fleet crowd, Hermes for the own-your-stack crowd, and Duet for the professional who wants the briefing written before coffee. If your mornings are drowning in tools, Duet’s preview is worth a seat at the table.