I Should Join Anthropic Anthropic launched Claude Duet on 21 October, a proactive agent app that runs on Claude Opus 5.5 and asks users before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything, available as a research preview by waitlist on iOS, Android and claude.ai for Pro and Max subscribers in the US. The launch drew attention from Daiku founder and author of the account, whose startup daiku.ai had used the headline "Your AI does the clicking. You keep the final say." since a 7 October commit (e6385883) and a 10 October Wayback Machine capture, 11 days before Anthropic's launch video displayed the same five words 45 seconds in. The author notes Anthropic's Claude in Chrome has asked before high-risk actions since August 2025 and that Anthropic published research on keeping people in control of agents in April, while Anthropic separately says DeepSeek distilled Claude. I Should Join Anthropic This post is about the day Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com launched Claude Duet https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet with the exact words on my startup’s homepage and why I’ve come out of it thinking I should join them. On Tuesday, 21 October, I boarded a plane at 20:23 Berlin time to go speak at CityJS Athens https://greece.cityjsconf.org/ . 46 minutes later Anthropic announced Claude Duet and I saw it the next day while scrolling X. 45 seconds into the launch video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb-68zqcSVs&t=45s , the screen says this: That’s my line It’s the headline on daiku.ai https://daiku.ai , the startup I’ve been building since 4 October, and it has been since 7 October: I said “they copied me” out loud, then thought something a lot darker more on that below . What is Claude Duet? Claude Duet is a new app from Anthropic where Claude works as a proactive agent: it watches your connected apps for what needs you, does the tasks you give it in its own browser on a virtual machine while you’re away, and asks you before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 https://www.anthropic.com/claude/opus and you can’t pick another model. Right now it’s a research preview on iOS, Android and claude.ai, by waitlist, only for people on the Pro and Max plans in the US Anthropic’s help page https://support.claude.com/en/articles/17631495-get-started-with-claude-duet has the details . Anthropic’s post announcing it on X https://x.com/claudeai/status/2112984664256241837 had over 9 million views 2 days later, which for an app you can only get from a US waitlist is wild . I’m on the waitlist now I signed up from Germany so I’ll probably be waiting a while . Daiku said “You keep the final say” 14 days before Claude Duet The Daiku repo has the receipt: commit e6385883 , at 01:24:08 on 7 October Berlin time , added this line to the brand book in BRAND.md : Hero line: Your AI does the clicking. You keep the final say. The landing hero since 2026-10-07, when the owner asked for a site built to convert. The owner is me. A git date is easy to fake. The Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20261010153039/https://daiku.ai/ isn’t: it saved daiku.ai on 10 October with “Your AI does the clicking. You keep the final say.” as its headline, 11 days before Duet. Look at the 21st: at 10:42 that morning an email from Cloudflare for Startups https://www.cloudflare.com/startups/ said Daiku had $10,000 in credits for the next 12 months. And at 21:09 that same night, Anthropic shipped Duet Did Anthropic copy me? It sure looks like it: the same 5 words on a full screen of their launch video, 14 days after they went up as my headline. But there’s a wild twist. I wrote Daiku’s homepage copy with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news261017 in OpenCode https://opencode.ai . That’s where “You keep the final say” came from. Anthropic, meanwhile, says it “designed it around Claude Opus 5.5”, and Karan Ahuja https://x.com/ahuja karan/status/2112987751184527408 , who leads Duet, says he’s “been using Claude Duet to build Claude Duet”. So Duet was made with Claude and my line was made with DeepSeek. To be fair to Anthropic, asking before an agent acts was their idea before it was mine. Claude in Chrome https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-chrome has asked “before taking high-risk actions like publishing, purchasing, or sharing personal data” since August 2025. And Anthropic wrote about keeping people in control of agents https://www.anthropic.com/research/trustworthy-agents in April. The idea is old. It’s the exact 5 words that got me. Did DeepSeek distill Claude? Anthropic says DeepSeek distilled Claude distillation means training your own model on another model’s answers . In February, in Detecting and preventing distillation attacks https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks , Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax had over 16 million exchanges with Claude through about 24,000 fraudulent accounts, over 150,000 of them DeepSeek’s. In September, Anthropic’s threat report https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026 went further. It says “DeepSeek rerouted requests from users that were attempting to use one of DeepSeek’s models through third-party or Anthropic coding harnesses, like Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, or OpenCode” and “Selected tagged users then had their requests relayed to Claude Opus.” That’s over 12.1 million exchanges in 14 days in July. Wait, what ? Anthropic is saying some people who typed into OpenCode thinking they were talking to DeepSeek were talking to Claude Opus. It even says their data “was likely routed to Anthropic without the knowledge or consent of DeepSeek’s customers”. I typed into OpenCode thinking I was talking to DeepSeek I couldn’t find DeepSeek answering any of this and I have no way of knowing whether my own DeepSeek calls ever came back from Claude. But if they did, maybe Anthropic didn’t copy me at all. Maybe Claude wrote my line through DeepSeek, then wrote Duet’s line for Anthropic, and said the same 5 words twice, 14 days apart. And honestly, that scares me more than being copied. When every startup and every lab writes with models that might all be Claude underneath, we all end up with the same homepage, which is terrifying … who’s the original then? “My dream is dead” Back in Athens, I read the Duet announcement and my darkest thought went something like damn, they’re gonna eat me. I don’t fucking matter. That thought is an old one for me. I was born with severe hemophilia A and by the time I was 8, the working assumption was that I would never be anything https://tej.as/story html-2001 . On Wednesday that old thing haunted me again: one guy with a 17 day old startup, against a company that can put out an app and get 9 million views on one post. 7 minutes earlier I’d been telling my friend Faris that Cloudflare had just given Daiku $10,000 in credits and that it was “Crazy that people are taking this seriously”. At 14:00 Athens time I sent the Duet post to the people I tell everything, with 4 words: “My dream is dead”. Faris Aziz https://x.com/farisaziz12 , who runs ZurichJS https://zurichjs.com and had spent that morning getting Daiku to help him review conference talk submissions on his phone, replied “RIP” and then “go work on their team for Duet” hi Faris, this post is your fault . Then David Khourshid https://x.com/davidkpiano answered. David made XState https://xstate.js.org , runs Stately https://stately.ai , and is one of my closest friends in the industry and in life. I even MARRIED THEM I officiated his and Jenny’s https://x.com/jen ayy wedding . Jenny and my wife Lea are close too. 11 minutes after my text, he wrote “Your dream is evolving by force”: A dream evolving by force is a story so old it’s in the Bible Joseph yes, the Technicolor Dreamcoat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat one got sold into slavery by his own brothers. Years later, with them standing in front of him, he told them “As for you, what you intended against me for evil, God intended for good” Genesis 50:20 https://biblehub.com/bsb/genesis/50.htm . I’m not casting Anthropic as Joseph’s brothers, by the way: I doubt they know I exist. David had seen this coming. On 7 October, when I first showed him Daiku, he signed up and wrote “This field is going to get really crowded soon though lol”, then “The proactive thing is really good, would love to see your thing do that”. My reply? “Imma sell this to Anthropic”. Daiku got notices on 18 October it tells you the minute something needs you and 3 days later Anthropic launched “a proactive agent”. That afternoon I went back to work on why Faris’s review session had stopped after 2 or 3 talks. By the evening I’d found it Daiku never stopped him: ChatGPT did, after 287 browser steps for 16 ratings and fixed it. Why I’m building Daiku I’ve wanted this since I saw Iron Man