Anthropic’s late-October 2026 launch of Claude Duet, featuring a dedicated cloud VM, persistent memory across sessions, proactive task handling, and integration with thousands of apps, has driven overwhelming trader consensus that the company will meet the Muse benchmark before year-end. Meta’s September rollout of Muse established the category standard with its secure, always-on architecture for autonomous actions like email, shopping, and form-filling. Microsoft’s Autopilot preview and Perplexity’s ongoing efforts trail in feature parity and public availability, while Amazon remains further behind on consumer-grade agent infrastructure. Key near-term catalysts include full app-store releases, expanded connector ecosystems, and any regulatory or security disclosures that could accelerate or delay resolution by December 31, 2026.