Anthropic's Claude Duet checks your apps every few hours, briefs you each morning and asks before it pays, sends or deletes

Anthropic's new agent comes to you first, and its approval rules are worth copying in your own builds.

What happened

Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a standalone app on iOS, Android and claude.ai, built for professionals and small business owners. It is built around Claude Opus 5.5 and available by waitlist, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers.

Each morning it sends a short brief on the most important items across connected apps, then checks those accounts every few hours and messages you only when something needs attention. Anthropic says it checks every few hours rather than nonstop because constant checks would burn through plan limits much faster. It has its own virtual machine with a browser, so work continues when your laptop is off.

Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows exactly what it is about to do and waits for approval. Some actions are off limits even with approval, like trading securities or moving money between accounts. A new classifier is designed to block sharing of the strictest information tier, such as card numbers and government IDs.

Anthropic lists jobs like drafting invoice reminders from QuickBooks or Stripe, preparing payroll in Gusto and drafting follow ups from HubSpot deal history. It also says this early version might misread a thread or miscalibrate what is urgent.

My take

The pattern here matters more than the product. Read, draft and prepare on its own. Ask before anything that leaves the building. Hard block a short list of actions no matter what. That is the same split I use for client agents in n8n and CRM workflows, and it is the part most DIY builds skip.

Two details operators should notice. First, the polling interval is a cost decision, not a technical limit. Your own monitoring agents face the same tradeoff, so pick check frequency per source instead of one global schedule. Second, Anthropic admits it can misjudge urgency. Give any proactive agent a clear written definition of urgent for each client, or it will either spam people or stay quiet when it matters.

For many small businesses a tool like Duet may cover the personal admin. The business specific parts, like routing a lead to the right rep or syncing deal stages, still need workflows built around their own rules.

If there is one recurring task you wish an agent would just handle with your approval, tell me what it is. Send me a message through romielwillautomate.dev.