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The Proactive Agent Race Gets a Third Runner
Generative AI is moving beyond chatbots that answer one question at a time. The new goal is the proactive personal agent. It watches your schedule, writes reports, and finishes tasks in the background. With Anthropic’s entry, all three Silicon Valley AI giants now compete in this arena.
Anthropic arrives a little later than its rivals. Still, it has announced Claude Duet, a personal AI agent that goes head to head with OpenAI Dots and Meta Muse. Duet starts as a research preview. Paying Claude subscribers in the United States can join the waitlist today, and you can watch the video for a look at the product.
What Claude Duet Does
Anthropic describes Duet as a digital partner that takes initiative. In its words, Duet brings you the things that need your attention, completes the tasks you hand over, and keeps working in the background when you step away. Before it acts on your behalf, it checks with you first.
A Daily Briefing and Big Tasks
Like OpenAI’s design, Duet builds a short daily briefing and a to-do list from the apps you have connected. You can hand it tasks of any size. Small chores include scheduling meetings. Larger jobs include building a data dashboard from dozens of tools, making financial or sales forecasts, creating product prototypes, and building full web apps.
Opus 5.5 and Mobile Apps
Duet runs on Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model. For a more natural experience, Anthropic will also release standalone iOS and Android apps.
A Private Virtual Machine
You never need to keep a Claude window open. Duet works inside its own dedicated virtual machine. There it can finish long, complex tasks by itself. Anthropic promises that Duet messages you only when a decision or your attention is truly needed.
Pricing and Usage Limits
Anthropic’s pricing hits a rival’s weak spot.
20 Dollars Against 100 Dollars
Once Duet leaves testing and reaches general availability, ordinary Claude Pro subscribers can use it for $20 per month. By contrast, OpenAI Dots is limited to the OpenAI Pro tier, which starts at $100 per month. That is a five-fold gap, and it lowers the barrier for professionals who want an always-on agent.
Why Duet Checks In Only Every Few Hours
Duet shares its usage allowance with the other tools on the account, including the compute-hungry Claude Code. An Opus 5.5 agent that watched every account around the clock would drain that allowance in hours.
Anthropic therefore chose a practical trade-off. Duet checks your connected accounts only every few hours, because constant checking would burn through your plan far faster. Users can also set how often Duet notifies them and which topics it may raise on its own.
Privacy and Security Guardrails
An agent is only useful if you give it your email, calendar, and work apps. That raises obvious privacy worries. Anthropic added new classifiers and system prompt protections to address them.
- Credential isolation: Duet never sees your passwords or sign-in tokens directly.
- Sensitive data controls: information about personal health or personal finances is blocked by default. It passes through only when you explicitly tell Duet to share it.
Anthropic also plans to publish more technical details about Duet’s safety architecture in the coming days.
Claude Duet vs. OpenAI Dots
| Dimension | Anthropic Claude Duet | OpenAI Dots |
|---|---|---|
| Model and environment | Opus 5.5 in a dedicated cloud VM, with iOS and Android apps planned | OpenAI frontier model in an always-on cloud agent |
| Access | Research preview for US paid subscribers; Claude Pro ($20 per month) at general availability | OpenAI Pro tier only, from $100 per month |
| Usage control | Shared allowance; checks accounts every few hours; custom notification settings | Relies on a high-priced plan with a large compute allowance |
| Privacy | No direct access to passwords or tokens; health and finance data blocked by default | Cloud sandbox with permission prompts |
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