Anthropic, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The AI agent wars just escalated. Anthropic has unveiled Claude Duet, a standalone AI agent app designed to act as a proactive assistant — the kind that does work on your behalf instead of waiting for you to ask. Duet delivers a daily morning briefing and handles tasks ranging from scheduling meetings to building financial forecasts and web apps, Reuters reports.

Rather than responding to prompts, it monitors your connected apps — Gmail, Slack, and more than 6,000 connectors — and surfaces the items that need your attention. Duet is built around Anthropic’s new Opus 5.5 model. It’s available now on iOS, Android, and claude.ai as a waitlisted research preview, initially for U.S. subscribers on Pro and Max plans.

Anthropic says Duet requires user approval for sensitive actions — sending messages, paying for things, signing anything — and openly acknowledges its limits: the agent can misjudge urgency and is less effective at personal tasks like booking tickets. The launch follows OpenAI’s always-on “dots” agents last month and Meta’s Muse AI agent. The race to build AI that works while you’re away is officially on.