Who signs off on payroll at your place? Whoever it is, don’t hand that job to Anthropic’s new agent, Claude Duet, on day one. Its launch page lists payroll among the jobs (“Prepare and run payroll in Gusto, with hours, bonuses, and reimbursements filled in”), and the rule about when it asks first never mentions payroll.
An agent is an AI that works inside your apps and does jobs for you. Anthropic opened a waitlist for Duet on October 21, for “professionals and small business owners with more on their plates than they can track.” It’s US only for now. It comes with Claude Pro or Max at no extra charge, and Anthropic’s pricing page says Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually, and Max starts at $100 (read October 22).
Here’s the rule, word for word from the launch page:
Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything, it shows you exactly what it’s about to do and waits for your approval.
That’s four verbs. The write-ups I read either skip the rule or repeat it and move on, and none of them checked it against the page’s own list of jobs. So I sorted that list, ten jobs in all. The table is my reading, not Anthropic’s.
| Job on the page | Approval step named in that line? | My reading |
|---|---|---|
| Find missed Gmail and Slack messages, help you reply | No | Sending a message, so covered |
| Check QuickBooks or Stripe for unpaid invoices, draft reminders | No | Sending the reminder is sending a message, so covered |
| Prepare and run payroll in Gusto | No | Is a payroll run “makes a payment”? The page doesn’t say |
| Draft a job post, post it to LinkedIn | Yes: “once you edit and approve” | Named in the line |
| Prepare agreements, send them through Docusign for signature | No | Sending a contract isn’t “signs a document”. The page doesn’t say |
| Draft follow-up emails from HubSpot history | No | Sending a message, so covered |
| Turn a product launch into a social campaign in Canva | No | Making and publishing assets is none of the four verbs |
| Set up, design and manage a Shopify store | No | “Manage” a live store is none of the four verbs |
| Buy things with Stripe’s Link | Yes: Duet “confirms the item with you, and Link asks you to approve the spend” | Named, twice |
| Check out at online stores with Shop Pay | No | Making a payment, so covered |
Two lines name an approval step themselves. Four fall under one of the verbs without any stretch. Four I can’t place: running payroll, sending a contract, publishing a Canva campaign and changing a live store. Anthropic may well gate all of them. I haven’t run Duet, so I can’t tell you what its approval screen shows for a payroll run. What would you want that screen to say before the money moves?
What the Page Doesn’t Put a Number On
Duet shares your plan’s usage limits with the rest of Claude. The page gives no figure for how much it eats. The only clock it offers is that Duet “checks your connected accounts every few hours, because checking nonstop would use up your plan’s limits much faster.” If a few means three, that’s eight checks a day. I don’t know what a few means, and neither does the page.
Everything here rests on one source, Anthropic’s own launch page. It says it will “share more details about how Claude Duet is designed for safety in the coming days,” and that could settle the payroll question in a paragraph. Until it does, treat my table as a question for Anthropic, not a finding.
Start With the Inbox, Not Payroll
Connect your email and calendar first. Let it draft the invoice reminders, and read each one before anything goes out. Leave payroll, e-signature and the store disconnected until you’ve watched it ask about something small. The page says you can disconnect any app. Which of yours would you connect first?
If you want help picking the first job to hand an agent, the free thirty-minute call is open. Bring one job.