Approval fatigue is the hard part of agents that work while you're away. What Claude Duet's published stop rules show

Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet this month, an agent meant to send a morning brief, keep working while you're away and check with you before it acts. Launch coverage mostly lists features. The more useful part for anyone building or choosing an agent is the stop rules in Anthropic's safety write-up, because they address the question most launches skip: when does the agent stop and ask? According to that write-up: - It reads, drafts and prepares work on its own. Before it sends a message, pays, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you what it's about to do and waits for approval. - Some actions are off-limits even with approval, like trading securities, moving money between accounts and accessing someone else's account. - Some steps aren't covered by a "don't ask me again" rule, however often you've approved them: paying or sending money, deleting an order, creating an account. Routines that run while you're away have the same safeguards. - Anthropic calls approval fatigue "a serious issue, because too many requests teach people to tap through them", and says it will keep adjusting how often it asks. - Anthropic describes a separate automated check that runs outside the model doing the work, designed so that instructions hidden in a page cannot affect the outcome. That is design intent, not a guarantee. The write-up says the safeguards "will occasionally miss something or flag a harmless message". A suggested takeaway, added here and not something Anthropic says: judge a proactive agent by its stop rules more than its feature list. Ask what it does without asking, what can never be pre-approved, and whether scheduled runs face the same gates as live ones. Then ask how often it interrupts you, since an agent that asks too often trains you to tap through. This is Anthropic's own description of a research preview, not an independent test. I've put a longer version on my profile (u/shoumikgoswami), including what happens to data when you disconnect an app. Which action would you never want an agent to take without asking, even after you'd approved it a hundred times?