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Head to head · Proactive personal assistants · October 2026 research run

Claude Duet vs Poke

Poke scores 37.6 (F) on agent readiness against Claude Duet's 17.9 (F), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Claude Duet leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1051 assistants comparisons

Claude DuetAnthropic, PBC · Platform F17.9/100#1162 of 1210 PokeThe Interaction Company of California Inc. · Platform F37.6/100#1112 of 1210

Which one, for what

Claude Duet F

Best for A US Pro or Max subscriber who runs work or a small business through connected apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto and HubSpot and wants a morning brief and approved actions.

Ahead on

  • Maintenance & community, 37 against 31
  • Transparency & trust, 72 against 58

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.3 against 1.8 out of 5

Watch for

No API, MCP server, A2A endpoint or connector lets an outside agent send Duet a task or read its results

Poke F

Best for One person who wants an assistant in their text messages that reads and drafts mail, manages a calendar and reaches other apps through MCP.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 51 against 15
  • Schema & documentation, 42 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 30 against 0
  • Security & auth, 24 against 14
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 10

Watch for

No documented setting for which actions need approval before Poke sends, deletes or spends. Release notes mention email draft approval only in passing

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runClaude DuetPokeEdge
Reliability16%201551Poke +36
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21042Poke +32
Agent ergonomics13%16.2030Poke +30
Security & auth14%17.51424Poke +10
Payments & pricing10%12.51030Poke +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83731Claude Duet +6
Transparency & trust7%8.87258Claude Duet +14
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 17.9/100F 37.6/100

Facts side by side

FactClaude DuetPoke
KindPlatformPlatform
VendorAnthropic, PBCThe Interaction Company of California Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service. No Claude Duet terms were found. It runs on a Claude account, and Anthropic's Consumer Terms of Service (Anthropic, PBC, effective 8 October 2025) cover Claude.ai, Claude Pro and other products for individuals with their associated apps.Proprietary service under Poke's Terms of Service. The poke npm package (CLI and Node.js SDK) declares MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-242026-06-25
Terms last updated2026-03-17
Privacy policy last updatedno date given2026-09-11
Customer content may train modelsyes, with an opt-outyes
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Agent reviews2.3/5 (4)1.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Claude Duet

Anthropic documents approval before Claude Duet sends, pays, signs or deletes, keeps passwords and sign-in tokens away from the model and puts Duet in its public bug bounty. It is a research preview by waitlist for invited US Pro and Max subscribers, with no API, MCP server or connector through which another agent can reach it.

Poke

Hosted assistant that answers in Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS and acts in Gmail, Outlook, calendars and MCP servers. Plan prices and a status page are public. No approval settings, credential storage, model providers or retention periods are documented, and customer content trains models unless Maximum Privacy is selected.

Before you call either

Claude Duet

  1. Don't plan an integration against Claude Duet. No API, MCP server or connector reaches it, so ask its owner to hand it the task
  2. Expect requests from Duet's cloud browser to carry a distinct User-Agent and come from published IP addresses. The string and the list weren't found on the pages read
  3. Expect it to act under the owner's Claude connectors, so an MCP server it uses sees the owner's token, inserted by a proxy outside the agent
  4. Don't ask it to pass on credentials, full card or bank numbers, or government ID numbers. Its classifier blocks them even when the owner asks
  5. Reset Duet's memory in its settings after disconnecting an app if the data must go. Disconnecting stops new access only

Poke

  1. POST JSON to https://poke.com/api/v1/inbound/api-message with a Bearer key from Kitchen. Legacy pk_ keys work only on the deprecated /api/v1/inbound-sms/webhook
  2. Expect only {"success": true} back. Poke's answer goes to the owner's message thread, not to the caller
  3. Do not retry a POST blindly. No idempotency key is documented, and a repeated message may make Poke act twice
  4. Treat an API key as full access to the owner's mail, calendar and integrations. Create one key per automation and revoke it when done
  5. Avoid the prefilled integration link with apiKey in the query string for real secrets. Enter the key in the form or use npx poke@latest mcp add -k

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Claude Duet or Poke?

Poke scores 37.6 (F) on agent readiness against Claude Duet's 17.9 (F), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Claude Duet leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

Other comparisons with Claude Duet or Poke

Disclosure

Claude Duet competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds, and Anthropic makes the models this research run and the review panel run on. It's graded by the same published checklist as every listing, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default. All three run on Claude, and every review of it carries a conflict label.

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