4IR illustration · AI-generated
Claude wants to help with your inbox
Anthropic has announced Claude Duet, an AI assistant that checks your email and calendar, drafts replies and helps you get ready for meetings. You connect the apps you want it to use, and it checks them every few hours to see what needs your attention.
You can also ask it to make a presentation or build a dashboard, then close your laptop and leave it to work. Duet runs on a computer in the cloud, so it doesn’t need yours to stay on. When the work is ready, or it needs you to make a decision, it messages you.
Anthropic shared a couple of examples from early users. A real estate broker said Duet caught a showing booked for the wrong day. A brand strategist said it noticed that a client call was scheduled right before her flight and offered to move it. These are testimonials picked by Anthropic, so we don’t yet know how often it misses things. Still, catching a calendar mistake is a pretty good reason to want an assistant.
There’s a catch: you still need to approve messages before it sends them, and the same goes for payments, signatures and deletions. Anthropic also says Duet can misread a conversation or get the urgency wrong. You can hand over the prep work, but you still need to check what it’s about to do.
Duet is starting with a waitlist for US subscribers on Claude’s Pro and Max plans. It works on the web, iPhone and Android. The background work counts toward your Claude usage limit, so you may have less left for other chats if you give it a lot to do.
Sources: Anthropic announcement · Duet details
If you have a website, send this to your developer
PHP, the programming language behind many websites, released an urgent security update on Wednesday. It fixes two flaws that could let an attacker run code on an affected server without logging in. Researchers found one of those flaws with help from an OpenAI model.
OpenAI says the research firm Calif used GPT-5.6 Sol to find a flaw. Security company Wiz independently found both, and PHP’s maintainers put together the fixes. Several other companies helped get protections ready before the details were published.
If you run a website, you don’t need to work through the technical advisory yourself. Send the link below to your host or developer and ask: “Does our site use PHP, and have the October 21 security updates been installed?” A website can have all its latest page and plugin updates while the server underneath still needs attention.
PHP says temporary workarounds don’t fully fix these problems. If your server is affected, it needs the update.
Sources: OpenAI disclosure · PHP security advisory
— Scott