• Anthropic has its answer to AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
• Claude Duet, built on Anthropic's flagship model, has entered the personal agent frenzy.
• Karan Ahuja, a recent departee from Meta, led Claude Duet's development.

Anthropic is joining the personal AI agent craze.

The company announced the new app Claude Duet on Wednesday, billed as a "proactive agent" that can run in the background, surface tasks to a user, and handle a variety of work. The tool is in research preview for now with a waitlist, meaning it won't immediately compete for the larger market with other new agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

Still, the announcement ramps up the pressure on those companies — Anthropic says it built Duet around its flagship Opus 5.5 model, which was released in late September and has already become one of the industry's most popular. Recent model breakthroughs have made AI better at handling work on its own, spurring a rush to build these "always-on" personal agents.

"It can have the discernment and judgment around when to be proactive, when to act on your behalf," said Mike Krieger, a co-lead of Anthropic's Labs team, said in a Duet launch video.

The tool, Anthropic says, will send users a brief each morning about what's happening on their connected apps, and message them when something needs attention. Like other companies' offerings, it runs outside a user's computer, sends notifications, and asks for approval on certain tasks.

Anthropic announced Duet on the day of Meta's earnings report and used the opportunity to mention a new poach from Mark Zuckerberg's company. Karan Ahuja led product management for Meta Superintelligence Labs until July, according to his LinkedIn, before starting at Anthropic in August and leading Duet's development.

He wrote on X that he's been using Duet to build Duet, and said the team "built it for professionals and small business owners juggling a lot at work and at home."

Ahuja also wrote that Anthropic is letting people into Duet from the waitlist "as quickly as possible."

The news didn't go unnoticed at Meta. Alexandr Wang, who heads Meta Superintelligence Labs, posted a meme about Duet's similarity to Muse.

Anthropic is fast approaching a giant initial public offering, which could value the company at as much as $2 trillion. Like other AI players, the company navigates a high-wire competition to win over users, secure computing power, build state-of-the-art models, and deliver AI-native products.

The data firm Apptopia estimates that Muse had more than 14 million installations as of Wednesday. It found that Claude users who installed the Muse app were using Claude more than before, though still for fewer minutes per day than they spent on the Meta product.

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• Abdulrahman Alfozan will stay jailed pre-trial, a San Francisco judge decided Monday.
• The engineer is accused of bugging a conference room at OpenAI, and he has been fired.
• Alfozan posed a risk of non-appearance, the judge said, after discussing his ties to Saudi Arabia.

A former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging the AI startup's office was denied release by a San Francisco judge on Monday, meaning he'll have to mount his defense from jail.

The Justice Department arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan on October 9 and charged him with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He's accused of placing a recording device behind a television in an OpenAI conference room — an FBI affidavit includes photos of the device wrapped in toilet paper, and a man they say is Alfozan peering behind the TV.

On Monday, the engineer wore a yellow surgical mask and a jail-issued orange sweatshirt to the San Francisco courthouse. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse prodded Alfozan's legal team about the risk that he might not appear for a future court hearing.

Tse said that Alfozan's wife and son had traveled to Saudi Arabia with no plans to return, and went back and forth with Yasin about a one-way ticket that Alfozan had previously booked to the country. Tse said that Saudi Arabia and the US do not have an extradition agreement, and expressed skepticism that he had sufficient ties to the Bay Area to prevent his departure.

William Pernik, Alfozan's attorney, argued that, rather than being detained, Alfozan should be fitted with an ankle monitor, ordered to stay home, and have limits placed on his use of technology. The lawyer also said Alfozan is willing to put up "essentially all the money his family has" as bond, including a roughly $1 million investment account.

"Everything this man has, he's willing to surrender, and say, 'I'm not going anywhere,'" Pernik said.

Pernik and Nas Yasin, another of Alfozan's attorneys, cited his coming naturalization interview as evidence of his local ties.

"He was weeks away from achieving every immigrant's dream in this country," Pernik said.

Yasin told Tse that she learned Alfozan's wife had obtained a short-term visitor visa to return to the US, to help improve her husband's case for ties to the Bay Area.

Tse also asked Alfozan's legal team a slew of questions about his relationship with Saudi Arabia, including a commitment by the Saudi consulate to pay his bond and support his legal effort.

Nick Parker, an assistant US attorney, appeared for the prosecution. He argued that the threat of forfeiting a $1 million bond wouldn't be enough to convince Alfozan to return if he made it out of the US, because he might be able to earn more money in Saudi Arabia.

"There is a real threat here that once he leaves, the case is over," Tse responded.

The judge scheduled the case's next hearing for early November.

OpenAI called the recording device "sophisticated" when the arrest went public, though it said it hadn't found signs that he'd taken AI model weights, source code, or customer information. OpenAI fired Alfozan.

Alfozan's charge carries a maximum penalty of 5 years. Pernik said in a statement last week that the allegations "appear wholly out of character for him."

Alfozan, 35, has a green card that makes him a lawful permanent resident of the United States. He attended MIT, then worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2017 to 2023. After a stint at the engineering startup Nash Technologies, Alfozan joined OpenAI in 2025.

FBI agents have already taken Alfozan's Saudi passport.

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• Anthropic published new surveys comparing its staffers' sentiments to those of US workers.
• The AI startup's employees expect the tech to change work and the economy far more dramatically.
• Most Anthropic employees guessed that unemployment would top 12% in 2030.

Anthropic employees believe that AI will make their labor obsolete. Most US workers don't see their jobs that way at all.

The AI company published research on Friday that compares surveys with US adults against an internal poll of 1,334 Anthropic employees. Most of the Anthropic staffers said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030, while only about 5% of the US workers felt the same.

The research, titled "The AI expectations gap," shows the chasm between how the employees at the AI startup feel and how other American adults feel. Anthropic workers are far more optimistic about the progress of AI capabilities, how much it's already saving time, and how fast the economy will grow.

The median Anthropic employee said that by the end of 2030, they expect AI to handle 95% of the work of building a new AI model.

Peter McCrory, Anthropic's chief economist, wrote on X that the views might help outsiders prepare for more capable AI systems.

"We're publishing this research because Anthropic runs roughly a year and a half ahead of the economy on AI adoption, so what happens at Anthropic could be a leading indicator for the broader world," he said.

Anthropic workers expect higher unemployment and extreme GDP growth

Anthropic's surveys examined how workers already use AI and how they think it will change.

"US adults and Anthropic staff largely agree about what AI can do today," the researchers wrote. "However, they disagree about how quickly it will improve, how widely it will be used, and how large the productivity gains measured by time saved will be."

There are a few possible explanations for the discrepancies. Anthropic employees have larger budgets for the tools and often get access to unreleased models. US workers, on average, are more likely to work with their hands or in a service industry.

The researchers found that workers in manual trades, production, and transport thought AI would handle the least of their work by 2030, compared with Anthropic staffers, tech workers, and respondents in business and finance.

Most Anthropic employees surveyed said that they expect the unemployment rate to top 12% in 2030. The majority of the US workers thought it would hover around or under 8%. It's currently 4.2%.

So far, researchers have found mixed evidence on AI disrupting the job market — a Yale team recently found it had mainly changed jobs, and had "no connection" to changes in unemployment.

The Anthropic researchers also compiled survey responses to estimate predictions on economic growth. Based on their answers, the median US adult's guess for GDP growth in 2030 was 5.4%, compared with 17.1% among Anthropic employees. The country's GDP grew by 2.2% last year.

Anthropic's staffers are following their leader

Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has become one of the industry's most closely watched voices on labor upheaval. In March of 2025, he said he expected AI to write 90% of code within 6 months, and "essentially all of the code" within the year. He made more headlines that May, telling Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and lift unemployment to 10% or 20%.

Amodei expanded on that claim in a later essay, writing that he expects AI to be different from prior technological changes. He wrote that he expects an "unprecedented" short-term shock to labor, and that the economy will grow dramatically.

"AI isn't a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans," he wrote.

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• OpenAI's Alexander Embiricos said the AI era gives a choice: work more, or work less.
• He's in charge of Dots, the company's new always-on work assistant.
• AI is often pitched as freeing up time. Embiricos responded to the idea that it might add more work.

As the competitive AI race pushes tech workers into long hours, the head of OpenAI's new Dots product says AI gives people another option: work a whole lot less.

Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product and helms the new Dots agent tool, told a crowd at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference on Thursday that AI's capabilities have created something of a fork in the road for workers. You can grind to meet the moment. Or you can use AI to kick your feet up a little.

"We basically have a lot more choice now," he said.

Embiricos made the comments after a reporter asked about when AI systems will actually deliver more free time. The reporter shared an anecdote where an OpenAI employee used a ChatGPT mobile feature to work in their car and on a plane — not exactly liberated by the new tech.

Embiricos said that the moment has already arrived where a worker can "outsource" tasks to AI and do less work. Then again, some people are so excited about AI's potential that they feel like it's an "interesting, ripe moment" to put in extra hours.

"I think that's why a lot of people are motivated to work very hard right now. That includes myself," he said. "But I think actually there is this choice, and there's totally this other setup where you could delegate a ton more things."

OpenAI is billing its Dots tool as a workplace assistant, always on and capable of proactively handing tasks and sorting to-dos. Embiricos uses his Dot often in Slack, he said, engaging on various threads.

His perspective illustrates how early companies are in their journey to adopt AI tools. Most companies have not yet automated their work tasks, and many workers are still debating how much to use the tools. Early AI adopters, meanwhile, can sprint through some work that used to take days or weeks, especially in software engineering.

Embiricos summed up the situation he feels workers are in: "You either choose: do you expand the ambition of what you can do, or do you do less? I do think we're there."

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