Anthropic launches Claude Duet as research preview

Anthropic's push into personal assistants did not start with Duet. The company introduced Claude Tag in June to follow Slack discussions and check back on unresolved tasks, and in September it updated Claude to combine chat with Cowork so it could keep working after users closed their laptops. Duet extends that line by drawing on the memories, skills and application connections users have already set up in Claude.

The business audience for Duet fits Anthropic's existing emphasis on work. In April, the company said more than 1,000 business customers were each spending over $1 million on an annualized basis, double the number two months earlier. Duet puts more administrative tasks within reach of an individual subscriber, though the company has not said what it will charge after the preview.

One constraint is capacity. Anthropic acknowledged in April that rapid growth had strained its infrastructure and impacted reliability and performance, and compute capacity could affect how quickly it admits Duet users. Duet also shares its usage limits with ordinary Claude chats, so even when users are not sending messages, its background checks eat into their quota. Anthropic says it will check connected accounts every few hours, since continual checking would reach usage limits much faster.