Claude's New Agent Works in the Background While You Run the Business: The 20-Minute Setup Before Your Invite Arrives
Anthropic's Claude Duet checks your connected apps every few hours and drafts replies, invoice reminders, and contracts for you to approve. It is open to personal Pro and Max plans only, so decide what it can touch before you connect your company email.
What shipped: On October 21, Anthropic opened a waitlist for Claude Duet, a research preview of an AI agent that keeps working after you close the app. It runs on a hosted cloud computer, checks your connected accounts every few hours, and sends a morning brief with flagged emails, calendar items, and draft replies for you to approve. Anthropic's own examples: find unpaid invoices and draft reminders, prep payroll for review, and get contracts ready to send.
What it means for you: This is a mainstream assistant that does work while you are on a job site. That is useful. It also means everything you connect gets read on a schedule, by a tool that brings along the memory, skills, and app connections from your existing Claude account.
Three facts to know before your invite arrives:
- It asks before it acts on four things: sending a message, paying, signing a document, or deleting anything. Reading your connected accounts happens without asking, because that is the job.
- It is open to US Pro and Max subscribers only. Team and Enterprise plans are excluded for now. Pro and Max are individual plans, so connecting company email or books puts business data on a personal account.
- Checks run every few hours and count against your plan's usage limits. Anthropic says checks may miss updates in between, so it should never be your only watch on anything urgent.
The 20-minute setup:
- Pick one job. Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT to choose it:
I run a [type of business]. Here are the checks I do by hand every week: [list them]. For each one, tell me: which apps an AI agent would need to read, whether it would ever need to send, pay, sign, or delete, what goes wrong if it misreads something, and a one-sentence test for whether it worked. Then recommend the single safest, highest-value job to start with.
- Connect only what that job needs. Unpaid invoices need your accounting tool and maybe email. Leave bank, payroll, and CRM off until the first job earns trust.
- Clean the memory first. Duet inherits what Claude remembers. Delete client, money, staff, and login details before you connect anything.
- Decide whose account. If the job touches company data, the owner runs it on an account the company controls. Write down every app connected to it.
- Approve every draft for 14 days. Note each one you had to fix.
- Keep it or kill it on day 14. Keep it if it saved an hour a week with no bad drafts. Otherwise disconnect every app.
Keep it safe: Never connect an account that holds client files your contracts say stay private. When in doubt, wait for business-plan support.