Claude Duet waitlist: who gets in, what it does and what it costs

What Claude Duet actually does

Regular Claude waits for you to open a chat. Duet works the other way round: according to Anthropic’s announcement, it “comes to you with what needs your attention.” In practice that means three jobs:

• A morning brief summarizing the most important items across your connected apps, often with drafted next steps.
• Periodic monitoring of those apps “every few hours,” with a message only when something needs you.
• Delegated tasks, from scheduling a meeting to building a dashboard, a sales forecast, a prototype or a small web app.

Duet runs on its own virtual machine with its own browser, so work continues after you close the app. Everything happens in one ongoing thread that you can type or talk into. The help center describes a Tasks tab for work in progress and a Make tab for finished files. It is available as a standalone app on iOS and Android and on the web at claude.ai.

There is no model picker. Duet uses Claude Opus 5.5 and decides how much effort each job needs. Anthropic positions it for professionals and small business owners and says plainly that personal errands, such as booking tickets, are a weaker area than work tasks.

How the Claude Duet waitlist works

You join from the product page by entering your name, email, plan and phone type (iPhone or Android). Once admitted, you get an email, install the app from that invitation and sign in with your Claude account. Anthropic’s support article lists three conditions:

1. A Claude Pro or Max subscription.
2. A US Claude account.
3. An invitation from the waitlist, sent in waves.

Why your invite may not work

The most common problem the help center describes is an email mismatch. Access is tied to the address you typed into the waitlist form. If that differs from the email on your Claude account, or from the Apple or Google account on your phone, the app may not recognize you. Wait for the access email before setting up the app. If you just received the invite and still see nothing, the article notes it can take a few minutes for access to appear.

Team and Enterprise seats are not eligible during the preview. Anthropic says it plans to add them later but has given no date, and the announcement names no countries beyond the US.

Pricing and the usage-limit math

Duet costs nothing extra while it is in preview, but it does not have its own quota. It draws from your plan’s five-hour session limit and weekly limit at the same rate as chat. Background work, including the morning brief and the periodic account checks, counts too, and larger tasks use more model turns. To soften the start, newly admitted users get one full reset of both the five-hour and weekly limits, which the help center says is available until November 30, 2026.

Prices were checked on October 29, 2026 against Anthropic’s pricing page and its Max plan help article, which notes that mobile in-app prices may differ. The takeaway: on Pro, Duet’s always-on checks compete with your normal chat and coding usage. If you already hit Pro limits in a typical week, expect to hit them sooner with Duet connected to several busy inboxes. Max is the more realistic tier for daily, heavy use; Pro is fine for trying it out.

Connectors, approvals and hard limits

Anthropic says Duet works with more than 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace, and it carries over the memory, skills and connected apps from your Claude account from the first message. The help center names Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Slack, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Docusign and Calendly. For sites without a connector it uses its cloud browser. One discrepancy: the product page shows Microsoft 365 among its examples, while the help center says Microsoft 365 is not available in Duet yet and Slack works with limits. We treat the help center as the current answer.

What needs your approval

Duet prepares work on its own but shows you the action and waits before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything. If you can’t respond right away, it finishes the rest of the task and asks later. Purchases go through Link, Stripe’s wallet, using a one-time card that only works for that purchase, or through Shop Pay at Shopify stores.

What it won’t do, even with approval

• Trade securities or move money between accounts.
• Access someone else’s account.
• Make phone calls or send text messages (it can send email from connected accounts with your approval).
• Let you watch or take over its browser.
• Change your existing Claude work, which it can read but not edit.

On security, Duet never sees passwords or sign-in tokens directly; when a site asks for one, you type it into a separate form outside the chat. A dedicated classifier refuses requests to share the most sensitive data, such as credit card numbers and government ID, and shares health or personal finance details only on explicit instruction. The help center also warns about prompt injection, meaning instructions hidden in emails or web pages, and cites it as a reason consequential actions are gated. On October 23, Anthropic added a note to the announcement saying it is continuing to strengthen these protections.

Should you join?

Duet makes the most sense if a large part of your day is triage: email, calendar, invoices, CRM updates and documents waiting for a signature. That is exactly the profile Anthropic designed it for. If you mostly open Claude for writing, coding or research sessions, the gain is smaller, and background checks will spend limits you would rather use in chat.

Before you are admitted, a little preparation pays off because Duet inherits your setup:

• Trim connectors to the apps you actually rely on; fewer sources means less background usage.
• Review Claude’s memory so stale details don’t skew what Duet flags as urgent.
• Write skills for recurring jobs such as a weekly report or a proposal draft.
• Read every approval request. Anthropic itself says Duet may misread a thread or misjudge urgency, and items can arrive between check-ins.

Anthropic lists signing in with saved 1Password logins and a visual editor for Shopify storefronts as coming soon, without dates. We will update this guide when access widens beyond the US preview.