Meta set the early pace on Sept. 8, when it launched Muse as a personal AI agent aimed chiefly at consumers. By Meta’s Oct. 21 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada had created a Muse agent in roughly six weeks; about a quarter used it on a given day.¹

OpenAI followed on Sept. 29 with Dots, another always-on product designed to keep working after a user steps away. That sequencing matters for Anthropic: a personal assistant can become the front door to a user’s emails, calendars and routine decisions, potentially making rivals’ products harder to dislodge.¹

On Wednesday, Anthropic answered with Claude Duet, a research-preview app built around its Opus 5.5 model. The company is positioning it less as a digital concierge and more as a workplace operator: it can assemble morning briefs from connected apps, flag unfinished work, schedule meetings, build dashboards and draft forecasts. Anthropic says the agent “comes to you with what needs your attention” and checks with users before acting on their behalf.²

The pitch is proactive but deliberately bounded. Addy Osmani described Duet as running across “6,000 connectors/plugins” and continuing to work when users step away, while directing prospective users to a waitlist for the preview.Addy Osmani (addyosmani)³ Anthropic says it is geared to professionals and small-business owners rather than personal errands such as booking tickets.

That restraint is also a concession to the risks of handing an agent access to sensitive accounts. Duet asks for approval before major actions such as making payments or deleting information, and uses a dedicated classifier intended to block requests for the most sensitive data. Anthropic also warns that the early product “might misread a thread or miscalibrate what’s urgent.”⁴

For now, the competitive picture is uneven: Meta has scale, OpenAI has arrived with a broad always-on alternative, and Anthropic has chosen a narrower workplace lane. Duet’s waitlisted debut gives Claude users a reason to stay—but not yet a guarantee that it can catch Muse’s head start.