Anthropic introduced Claude Duet on October 23, 2026, a research preview of a personal AI assistant built for professionals and small business owners. Unlike a chatbot waiting for prompts, Duet is designed to work in the background, checking a user's email, calendar, and connected accounts on its own throughout the day.
Duet sends a morning briefing, drafts replies to emails, follows up on unfinished tasks, tracks things like unpaid invoices, and sets reminders, flagging the user only when a task is finished or a real decision is needed. It draws on a user's existing Claude memories, skills, and app connections rather than starting from a blank slate each time.
The launch puts Anthropic in the same race as Meta and OpenAI, both of which had already shipped their own always on assistants. Meta's version, Muse, launched September 8 and had already reached more than 10 million users across the United States and Canada within six weeks, with roughly a quarter of them opening it daily. OpenAI followed with its own assistant, Dots, on September 29. Without a product of its own in that category, Anthropic risked losing out on exactly the kind of daily, habitual use these assistants are built to capture.
