Claude Duet for retailers: how Anthropic's agent buys from your store and what to check

Direct answer: Claude Duet is Anthropic's new agent app. It shops the open web from a browser in the cloud and pays with Link by Stripe or Shop Pay, using a one-time card for each purchase the user approves. Shop Pay works in Duet even at stores that are not on Shopify. So any retailer selling to US shoppers can already receive Duet orders through its normal checkout, with no integration and no opt-in. Anthropic says the browser identifies itself with a distinct User-Agent. It does not publish that string on its crawler page, so robots.txt is not the control. Your checkout, your bot rules and your card risk settings are.

This guide is for ecommerce directors, heads of digital and engineering leads. It covers what Duet is and who can use it, how it reaches and pays at a store, how it identifies itself, what we found in the robots.txt files of the 225 retailers in our Agent Commerce Index, and what to check first.

Last verified: 29 October 2026 against Anthropic's announcement, safety article and Help Center, Shopify's Fall '26 Edition, Help Center and developer docs, Shop's Help Center and Stripe's announcement. Duet is a research preview and Anthropic says features can change, so check the current versions before you plan work.

What Claude Duet is and who can use it

Anthropic opened the research preview on 21 October 2026. The points that matter to a retailer:

• It works in the cloud. Anthropic's Get started page says Duet "works on its own computer in the cloud, so it can keep working after you close the app", and that "for sites that don't have a connector, Claude Duet uses its own browser in the cloud".
• It asks before it pays. Anthropic says Duet is designed to ask before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything.
• The user can't watch it shop. During the preview, users "can't watch Claude Duet work in its browser or take over the browser". If your checkout stops it, the user is told, not shown.
• Who it is for. Anthropic built Duet "for professionals and small business owners". Its examples of purchases are work supplies, such as reordering printer ink or shipping labels, and Stripe's announcement lists business cards, digital ads and lunch for the team. Anthropic adds that personal errands "aren't quite as strong" yet. Our reading: stores selling office, print, packaging and other business supplies are the likeliest early destinations, but nothing limits Duet to them.
• Where it is available. As of 29 October 2026, US only, on the Pro and Max plans, by waitlist, with invitations "in waves". Team and Enterprise plans are not eligible yet.

The shopper's location matters, not yours. A UK or European store that ships to the US can receive Duet purchases from US users today.

How Duet reaches and pays at a store

Duet has two payment wallets and one way of reaching most stores: its browser.

Link by Stripe

Stripe announced on 21 October 2026 that Anthropic had integrated Link's wallet for agents into Duet, so users can "buy anything they might need, anywhere on the internet" and approve each purchase before Claude completes it "with a virtual card". Anthropic's Link help page adds the detail:

• Duet does not submit the payment until the user approves the maximum amount. Link may place a temporary authorisation, and "the final charge is completed only if the merchant completes the purchase".
• Each purchase uses a one-time card "scoped to the merchant and amount".
• Duet "can't make recurring payments with Link". Subscriptions and anything billed later will not work this way.
• "A business may decline or block checkout after you approve the Spend Request", and "some sites can block Claude Duet from paying". The user may then have to finish the purchase themselves.

Shop Pay, including for stores not on Shopify

Anthropic's Shop Pay help page says Duet pays "using a one-time card that is scoped to the approved amount", and that Duet sees only the card type, last four digits, nickname, expiry and shipping addresses, never the full card number.

The bigger change is where Shop Pay now works. Shop's Help Center page on using Shop with AI agents says: "In Claude Duet and Instinct, you can use Shop Pay to pay for purchases from any online store, including brands and stores that aren't on Shopify." If the store does not offer Shop Pay, the user approves the purchase in Shop and the agent "receives a one-time payment credential to enter at the store's checkout". In Meta's Muse, by contrast, Shop Pay works only at Shopify stores. Shopify's Fall '26 Edition (28 October 2026) confirms Shop Pay for brands not on Shopify in Duet, and says agent purchases from merchants off Shopify are secured "with tokens from Mastercard, Visa, Discover, and coming soon, American Express".

Shopify's Shop Pay payment handler documentation explains the mechanism: when a merchant does not advertise Shop Pay, "Shop Pay materializes an instrument from the buyer's wallet, and the merchant processes it through its own payment processor, as it would any instrument of that type". For a non-Shopify retailer, a Duet order paid with Shop Pay looks like an ordinary card payment typed into your checkout.

Three details from Shop's page are useful to your customer service and payments teams:

• The statement descriptor. When Shop pays the store on the shopper's behalf, the shopper's statement shows "SHOPPAY*[store name]" or similar.
• Policies. When an agent buys, it "agrees to the store's shipping, refund, return, and cancellation policies" on the shopper's behalf, and the store "remains responsible for fulfilling your order and handling returns, refunds, warranties, and product support".
• Disputes. Shop tells shoppers that if they approved a purchase, or gave the agent permission to make it, "your attempt to dispute the transaction might be unsuccessful". That is Shop's statement to its users, not a rule for card disputes in general.

If you are on Shopify

Shopify's agentic storefronts page says customers "can also pay with Shop Pay when they shop through personal AI agents, such as Muse and other agents that they connect to Shop", that you "don't need to activate Shop Pay specifically for AI agents", and that these orders "display in your Shopify admin with attribution to the agent". The Fall '26 Edition also adds a knowledge base under Sales channels > Agentic, where you review and publish the store facts agents get from Shopify, such as return windows and shipping destinations.

Separately, Shopify lists Claude Duet among the agents its Shopify connector works with. That connector lets a merchant manage their own store from Duet. It is an admin tool, not a sales channel.

How Duet identifies itself

Anthropic's safety, privacy and security article (23 October 2026) makes three statements a retailer should know:

1. It says it identifies itself. "Today, requests that its web browser sends include a distinct User-Agent header, and we publish the public IP addresses it browses from, so sites can recognize it and decide how to treat it."
2. Some large sites opted out before launch. Anthropic "contacted several large websites and gave them the option to prevent Claude Duet from visiting their sites, and some chose to". It does not name them.
3. The browser is isolated. Duet's browser runs in its own virtual machine, and the agent drives it through fixed commands (open a page, click, type). Site code and cookies stay on the browser machine; the page's text comes back to the agent so it can do the job.

What we could not find: the User-Agent string itself. Anthropic's crawler help page lists three robots, ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot, says they honour robots.txt and links to a published IP list (creation time 20 October 2026). It does not mention Duet, and we found no Anthropic page that names Duet's User-Agent token or says that list covers Duet's browser. Until Anthropic documents it:

• Don't assume a Claude-User rule covers Duet. Claude-User is how Claude fetches a page when someone asks a question. Duet's browser is a separate product that Anthropic describes separately.
• Don't guess the string. A rule written for a token you have not seen in your own logs may match nothing, or the wrong thing.
• Look in your logs. If you want to treat Duet differently, check your CDN or server logs for an Anthropic-identified browser user agent coming from Anthropic's published addresses, and write the rule from what you see.

The contrast with Meta is worth noting. Our Meta Muse guide found that Meta documents no user agent for Muse's browser at all, and Amazon blocked it partly because it did not identify itself. Anthropic says Duet does. That makes a deliberate allow or block decision possible, once the string is known.

What we found in the Index

On 29 October 2026 at 08:06 (Gibraltar time) we fetched robots.txt for the 225 scored retailers in the Agent Commerce Index Q4 2026 and got a readable file from 208. The other 17 returned 403 or 429, timed out, or served something other than a robots.txt file.

"Disallow the whole site" means a group for that token with Disallow: / and no Allow lines. Separately, one retailer's User-agent: * group disallows the whole site and names no Claude token, so Claude-User falls under that block there. Aggregate figures only; no stores are named.

What it shows:

• Few retailers have written any Anthropic rule. 20 of 208 name a Claude token. The most common is ClaudeBot, which Anthropic describes as collecting content that could contribute to model training, not a shopping agent.
• Nobody blocks Claude-User by name. Of the 6 retailers that name it, none disallows the whole site.
• None of these rules is documented to reach Duet's browser. The control that matters for Duet is bot management on cart and checkout, which robots.txt cannot show.

Two figures already published from Index data help size the Shopify route. 129 of the 225 scored retailers run on Shopify, and in our 28 October fetch of /.well-known/ucp profiles, 114 of the 121 that served one listed Shop Pay as a payment handler (see our protocol comparison for what those profiles are). The checkout question is the larger one. In the Index basket test, 96 of 116 tested stores let a browsing agent reach checkout, against 8 for a page-fetching agent. Duet is a browsing agent, so it sits on the more favourable side of that split, but "reached checkout" is not "paid". Our guide to page-fetching and browsing agents explains where each one stops.

What Duet means for your checkout

Duet does not need an integration. It needs your checkout to work for a careful new customer arriving from a cloud browser with a one-time card. That gives four checks:

1. Guest checkout. Duet can sign in where the user types a password into Anthropic's secure form, and 1Password sign-in is "coming soon". A guest path is still the simplest route through. TRX-01 (guest checkout is available) in our scoring specification covers it.
2. Bot defences on cart and checkout. Duet runs from the cloud. A rule that challenges data-centre traffic or automation signals on cart or checkout can stop it, even if you never meant to block shoppers' agents. TRX-02 (cart is reachable by agent identities) and TRX-03 (no captcha on cart or checkout pages) cover the same ground. Our guide to whether you are blocking AI shopping agents walks through robots.txt, CDN and WAF settings.
3. Card risk rules. Link and Shop Pay off Shopify both pay with a one-time card for an approved amount. Check with your payments provider that your fraud rules don't decline single-use or virtual cards by default, and that a billing address check will not fail an order the user approved.
4. The total must not grow. The user approves an amount. Shipping, fees or a minimum-order surcharge that appear only at the last step can push the total past it, and the payment fails. Show delivery cost and time on the product page and in structured data: OFF-04 (shipping cost stated in structured data) and OFF-05 (delivery time stated on the product page). Our product structured data guide has the markup.

And because the agent agrees to your shipping, returns and cancellation terms on the shopper's behalf, make those terms easy to find and read: LEG-09 and LEG-10 check that the shipping and returns policy pages are discoverable, and TRU-02 that policy pages are linked from product pages.

What to do this week

1. Decide your position on Duet on purpose. If you want Duet users to buy, the work is checkout and bot rules. If you don't, wait for Anthropic to document the User-Agent, or build the rule from your own logs, rather than guessing.
2. Run a guest purchase from a cloud browser. Use a standard browser from a data-centre IP. Look for challenges on cart and checkout, forced sign-in, card fields that do not load and late price changes.
3. Ask your payments team two questions. Do we decline single-use virtual cards? And if you are not on Shopify, can customer service match a shopper who sees "SHOPPAY*[your store]" on their statement to an order that arrived as an ordinary card payment?
4. If you are on Shopify, open Sales channels > Agentic. Review the knowledge base facts agents receive, and agree how agent-attributed orders will be reported.
5. Check your subscriptions. Duet can't make recurring payments with Link. If subscription is your main offer, make sure a one-off purchase is possible, or accept that Duet users will be handed back to finish themselves.
6. Watch the logs. Start a saved search in your CDN or server logs for Anthropic-identified browser traffic on cart and checkout, so you can see Duet arrive and where it stops.

Sources

• Anthropic, Introducing Claude Duet, 21 October 2026
• Anthropic, Claude Duet Safety, Privacy, and Security, 23 October 2026
• Anthropic Help Center, Get started with Claude Duet, How to use Link by Stripe with Claude Duet and How to use Shop Pay with Claude Duet, read 29 October 2026
• Anthropic Help Center, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?, read 29 October 2026, and Anthropic IP list, creation time 20 October 2026
• Stripe, Stripe and Anthropic help entrepreneurs run their business inside Claude Duet, 21 October 2026
• Shop Help Center, Using Shop with AI agents and agentic platforms, read 29 October 2026
• Shopify, Exponential: Shopify's Fall '26 Edition, 28 October 2026
• Shopify Help Center, Shopify agentic storefronts, read 29 October 2026
• Shopify.dev, Shop Pay payment handler specification, read 29 October 2026
• ConversionVector, robots.txt fetch of the 225 scored Index retailers, 29 October 2026; /.well-known/ucp fetch, 28 October 2026; Agent Commerce Index Q4 2026 (CC BY 4.0) and Agent Conversion Score specification v0.6