Anthropic has opened a waitlist for Claude Duet, an agent that runs on its own virtual machine with its own web browser, so it can keep working on your tasks while your phone and laptop are closed. Subscribers to the Pro, Max and Ultra plans in the US can join. Team and Enterprise customers cannot yet.
Duet is paid for in usage, not in dollars
Every paid Claude plan has a limit on how much you can use in a rolling five-hour window, and a second limit for the week. Chat, Claude Code and Cowork all draw on them. During the preview, Duet draws on them too, including its routine checks of your connected apps. Anthropic built those checks to run every few hours instead of nonstop, because checking nonstop would use up the allowance much faster. That is a real tradeoff: something urgent that arrives between two checks waits for the next one.
If it checks four times a day, that is about 120 background runs a month before you have handed it a single task. Bigger jobs, like a financial model or a slide deck, take more steps and use more of the allowance. Anthropic has not said how much of a typical plan goes to background work, so the only way to know is to watch your own usage.
The same kind of agent is priced three ways
Meta's Muse agent is free for light use, and its $20 and $100 plans buy more weekly usage. OpenAI's Dots needs a ChatGPT Pro plan, which starts at $100 a month. Duet adds nothing to the $20 plan you may already pay for.
Each company has answered the same question differently: who pays for the part that works while you are away? Meta charges by how much you use. OpenAI sets a high entry price. Anthropic charges nothing extra and lets the agent share your own allowance. If people find that Duet's background work crowds out their chats, I expect Anthropic to give agent work its own meter, the way Meta already counts usage separately.
What to check before the invite arrives
Open the usage page in your Claude settings and see how close you get to your five-hour and weekly limits today. If you rarely come near them, Duet has room to work, and $20 is a good price for a morning brief and a weekly sales dashboard. If you already hit the limit by midweek, Duet will make that worse. In that case, give it one narrow job, such as the weekly sales summary, and leave the rest of your connected apps off.
Whether Duet's messages are worth reading is a separate question, and we covered it when it launched in alerts worth reading. Your allowance decides whether you can afford to find out.