Claude Loop Becomes Claude Duet: Anthropic's Agent Goes Mobile

Claude Loop has a new name: Claude Duet. Anthropic is now letting people off a waitlist into a research preview of its always-on personal agent, with test apps for iPhone and Android and a web version. We got in on October 20, 2026. Three days after our first look at Claude Loop, it has a name, a welcome email and a way onto your phone.

Our read after the first day: Claude Duet is a "chief of staff" layer on top of the machinery Anthropic built for Claude Code. It told us its own morning brief and check-ins run as Claude Code Routines, and that it can see and manage your Claude Code sessions. That plumbing is what separates it from OpenAI Dots and Meta Muse. One thing still hasn't changed: despite "Send a text" on the welcome screen, you can't text it from your phone's messaging app yet.

What is Claude Duet?

Claude Duet is Anthropic's personal agent: one ongoing chat where you hand Claude things to get done, connected to your email, calendar and work tools. It sends a morning brief, checks in when something needs you, and works on longer jobs in the background. Asked to introduce itself, it said: "In Claude Duet I work as a personal chief of staff that you text."

Anthropic's waitlist email labels it a research preview and suggests three things to try:

1. Hand off a task. Connect your email and calendar, then send it something from your to-do list, typed or spoken.
2. Let it come to you. Each morning it can message you with what needs attention, and even start on first steps such as drafting an email for you to review.
3. Ask it to make something. According to the email, it can make a brief, a slide deck or a working dashboard, which comes back finished for you to approve.

Is Claude Duet the same as Claude Loop?

Yes, as far as we can tell. The welcome page uses the same icon that Claude Loop had in the Claude app's menu: an orange circle with a white, hand-drawn looping line. The pitch is the same too. Loop's welcome screen said "I'm your 24/7 assistant. Text me anytime to get things done." Duet's says "You're in! Send a text or start talking to start a task with Claude."

Inside the Android app, the menu now carries the new name: "Claude Duet," next to that same loop icon.

Oddly, Claude Duet doesn't know it used to be Claude Loop. When we asked why the name changed, it said: "I don't have any record of the rename, so I can't confirm the old name or say why it changed." It offered its own reading of the new name and asked us to label it as unofficial: "A duet is two parts playing together, with neither one doing the whole song." Anthropic hasn't explained the change publicly. As of October 20, 2026, there's no announcement on its news page or blog.

One naming trap: "claude-duet" is also the name of an unrelated open-source tool on GitHub that lets two developers share one Claude Code session. It is not made by Anthropic and has nothing to do with this product.

How do you get Claude Duet?

Right now, only from the waitlist. Anthropic's email says: "You're off the waitlist, and your access to Claude Duet is open." It links to a single setup page for both phones, and it tells you the invite went to the email address you signed up with, so use the same account when you install.

• iPhone: install TestFlight, Apple's app for trying apps before release, open the invite from your email, and tap Install.
• Android: sign in to Google Play with the same email, tap "Become a tester," then install from Google Play. The page warns it "can take a few minutes to show up." The app doesn't appear in public Google Play search, which is normal for a test build.
• Web: open it in a browser with "nothing to install." Claude Duet told us the web version lives at claude.ai/messages.

Anthropic hasn't said which Claude plans include Claude Duet or which countries it's open to. Claude Duet itself wouldn't guess: "I can't answer that reliably. I don't know which plans or countries include Claude Duet, or whether there's a waitlist." Our test account is on Claude Max.

What's inside the Claude Duet app?

The Android app has three tabs along the bottom: Chat, Tasks and Make.

• Chat is the ongoing conversation with Claude.
• Tasks holds the longer jobs it works on in the background.
• Make builds things on request. It offers Document, Presentation and Design buttons under a "Describe what to build" box with a microphone. Below that is a shelf of what it has already made. On our account, that included a Morning brief and a Daily todo sheet, both dated for the next morning.

The Make tab also offers ready-made starters, such as "Daily todo: Today's list, refreshed every morning" and "Email triage: What needs a reply, by urgency."

The menu answers a question our Claude Loop first look got wrong. Claude Loop showed an empty "Channels" section, and we guessed it might mean more ways to reach Claude, such as SMS or WhatsApp. In Claude Duet, channels are topics, not phone lines. There's an "Everything" view, labelled "All chat context across every channel," and you add one channel per project, so a work stream can have its own thread while Claude keeps the full picture.

Can you text Claude Duet yet?

Not by SMS. "Send a text" on the welcome screen means sending a message inside the Claude Duet app. When we asked whether it now has a phone number, Claude Duet said: "Not for you right now. I don't have a phone number of my own here, so you can't reach me by SMS or your phone's messaging app."

What the phone app does add is voice. Anthropic's onboarding invites you to "start talking," and Claude Duet pointed us to a "Read replies aloud" setting that speaks its answers when you dictate. It also offers a "Share my location" option, which it says gives it only a rough, city-level location for things like weather or nearby places.

What does a day with Claude Duet look like?

Claude Duet described its routine this way. It sends a morning brief when your quiet hours end. After that, it checks your mail, calendar and connected tools "about every three hours between 08:00 and 22:00," and messages you only when something needs you. Everything else happens when you ask: drafting replies, research, building a document, fixing code, or setting reminders.

That three-hour rhythm explains the most honest line in Anthropic's email: "Claude Duet may misread a thread or misjudge what's urgent, and it can miss something that arrives between its checks." This is not an assistant watching your inbox second by second. It checks in on a schedule.

The unprompted catches were the most convincing part of our test. In the days before we interviewed it, Claude Duet had, on its own, noticed login details pasted into a team group chat and advised changing those passwords. It had explained why an email security filter flagged a form the account owner had built as phishing, and it had pointed out a nightly backup that had been failing for a week. Nobody asked it to check any of those.

Claude Duet says it runs on Claude Code's Routines

This is the detail that sets Claude Duet apart. Asked whether it can work with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, it said "Yes to both." It said it can see your recent cloud Claude Code sessions, including their titles, status and what each one is waiting on. It said it can read what happened in a session, send it a message or stop it.

It said it can also create, change, run and remove Routines, the saved Claude Code jobs that run on Anthropic's cloud on a schedule. And it said its own features depend on them: "That's how your morning brief, check-ins and Daily todo refresh run."

There's a limit. In Claude Duet's words, "Cowork tasks that live only on your computer don't show up for me." In our test, it also couldn't find a Claude Code session we had running on a local computer through Remote Control.

Why it matters: OpenAI built Dots as a new kind of character, and Meta built Muse around consumer errands. Anthropic appears to have taken the scheduler, cloud sandbox and connectors it already runs for developers and put a conversational front end on them. If you already use Claude Code, Claude Duet becomes one place to check on your coding work and everything else. If you don't, you get the same reliable plumbing without seeing it.

Can Claude Duet spend money?

Yes, but only with your approval each time. Claude Duet said it can browse in "my own cloud browser, or in your Chrome if you connect it," and book things. A free booking you've spelled out, it just does. Anything that costs money, signs you up or accepts terms waits for your yes. To pay, it uses a saved payment method or Stripe Link, and you approve each charge.

Then comes the hard line, in its words: "I never move money between accounts, place or change trades, pay a bank or lender, or touch payout and security settings, even if you say yes."

A correction: our Claude Loop first look originally said Loop ruled out payments entirely. That was our misreading of "never send, pay or delete anything without your yes," which means paying with your yes is allowed. We've corrected that article.

What does Claude Duet remember, and what can't it do?

Claude Duet said it keeps memory in two places: its own notes for the Duet chat, and your general Claude memory, which your other Claude apps share. You can tell it to forget something, or turn memory off with the "Generate memory from chats" setting. On whether conversations are used for training, it said it couldn't see our account's privacy setting and pointed us to Claude's privacy settings.

Connecting your inbox means it reads it. When we asked whether the tester program was confidential, Claude Duet searched our personal Gmail for an invite before answering. That was helpful, and a reminder to connect only the accounts you're comfortable with.

Its own list of what it can't do yet:

• Control your computer's screen
• Make phone calls or take texts by SMS
• Get past a website's "prove you're human" check, or pay by typing in a card number
• Know product facts Anthropic hasn't given it, such as plans, countries or its old name

It says it runs on claude-opus-5-5, Anthropic's current Opus model.

Claude Duet vs OpenAI Dots, Meta Muse and Gemini Spark

Asked to compare itself with its rivals, Claude Duet declined: "I haven't used any of them and news headlines aren't enough to judge them." Here's our comparison instead. The Dots, Muse and Spark details come from our September roundup of personal AI agents and our Meta Muse review.

	Claude Duet	OpenAI Dots	Meta Muse	Google Gemini Spark
Status (October 20, 2026)	Research preview, waitlist	Launched September 29	Launched September 8	Beta since May 19
Where you reach it	iPhone (TestFlight), Android (Play test), web	ChatGPT, Codex, Slack, Teams	Web, iOS, Android, WhatsApp	Gemini app, email CC, text chains
Avatar	None	Animated character you design	Video avatar announced for later	Not covered in our roundup
Money	Approves each charge; never transfers or trades	Not covered in our roundup	Checks out purchases with approval	Asks before spending
Built on	Claude Code Routines and connectors, by its own account	GPT-6 Astra, its own cloud computer	Meta's Muse Spark model	Gemini 3.5 in Google's cloud

On the missing avatar, Claude Duet asked not to be quoted on Anthropic's reasons, then offered its own guess: it's "meant to feel like a capable colleague you text, not a character."

Should you join the Claude Duet waitlist?

If your days run through email, a calendar and a project board, and especially if you already use Claude Code, yes. The proactive checks earned their keep in our first days. Treat it as the research preview Anthropic says it is:

1. Connect the minimum. It reads what you connect, so start with one inbox and one calendar.
2. Don't rely on it for urgent mail. It checks about every three hours, and Anthropic warns it can miss things between checks.
3. Read every draft and charge before you approve it. Approval is the safety net, and it only works if you look.
4. Ask what it remembers after the first week, and delete what you don't want kept.

Want to try Claude first? Claude Duet still needs a waitlist invite, but if you're new to paid Claude plans, this Claude referral link for a free week of Claude Pro lets you try it first. You add payment details and are charged only if you keep the plan after the free week. Disclosure: this is the author's own referral link. If you subscribe, the author receives $10 in Claude usage credits.

Trying Meta Muse instead? New Muse users who enter invite code DJH8N6 under Settings > Redeem Code within 48 hours of joining get 1 billion bonus tokens. Each code works only a limited number of times. Disclosure: DJH8N6 is the author's own invite code. If you redeem it, both of us receive the bonus tokens.

What to watch: real SMS or messaging-app texting, which would finally match the "send a text" promise; which plans Anthropic puts it on; and whether its Claude Code connection becomes the reason developers pick it over Dots. For the developer side, see our Claude Code review.

FAQ

What is Claude Duet?

Claude Duet is Anthropic's always-on personal agent, in research preview as of October 20, 2026. It works as a "chief of staff" in one ongoing chat, connected to your email, calendar and work tools. It sends a morning brief, checks in about every three hours during the day, and waits for your approval before anything that sends, spends or can't be undone.

Is Claude Duet the same as Claude Loop?

It appears so. Claude Duet uses the same icon and the same "text me" pitch that Claude Loop had when it appeared in the Claude app in mid-October 2026. Anthropic hasn't announced the rename publicly, and Claude Duet itself says it has no record of the old name.

How do I get Claude Duet?

Through Anthropic's waitlist. Once you're accepted, an email links to a setup page: TestFlight for iPhone, a Google Play tester invite for Android, or a web version with nothing to install. Use the same email address you joined the waitlist with. Anthropic hasn't said which plans or countries are included.

Can I text Claude Duet by SMS?

Not yet. Claude Duet told us it has no phone number, so you can't reach it by SMS or your phone's messaging app. "Send a text" means messaging it inside the Claude Duet app, which also supports talking to it and having replies read aloud.

Is Claude Duet related to the claude-duet tool on GitHub?

No. The open-source claude-duet project on GitHub is an unrelated developer tool for sharing one Claude Code session between two people. Claude Duet is Anthropic's own personal agent app.