What Happens When You Disconnect an AI Agent?

Compare what Muse, OpenAI dots and Claude Duet document about pausing work, revoking access and removing retained information.

Meta Muse, OpenAI dots and Claude Duet are personal AI agents that can work through connected applications and keep context across tasks. Their controls answer different questions: can you interrupt the work, remove access, inspect memory or erase a record?

In September’s The Switching Cost You Can’t See, we examined why accumulated context makes an assistant hard to replace. This follow-up examines the controls a buyer can actually investigate. Disconnecting a service, pausing an agent and deleting its memory are separate operations.

The comparison uses published documentation checked October 25, 2026. It is not an authenticated shutdown test. “Not established” below means the reviewed documentation did not settle the question; it does not mean a capability is absent.

Imagine a sales manager asks an agent to prepare a renewal brief, then changes roles while that work is still running. Someone disconnects the CRM and closes the app.

What stopped? What can still run? Which customer details remain in memory? Where did the draft go?

Those are four operational questions. I would ask a vendor to demonstrate each before putting an ongoing business process into the product. Closing the window is not a shutdown procedure.

Meta documents browser takeover for Muse, with the agent pausing while the user controls the browser. That establishes a way to intervene in the current interaction. It does not establish that future scheduled work has been cancelled.

OpenAI’s dot guide describes a Pause control and separate management of scheduled work. Its cloud computer can also be inspected and taken over. The remaining question for a specific workflow is what happens to work already launched in another system.

Anthropic’s Duet guidance describes task updates and steering, but says users cannot currently watch or take over its browser. Its safety documentation says work continues after the app closes.

For a demonstration, ask the operator to pause a harmless task and show its state. Then inspect routines or scheduled jobs separately. An inactive chat window is not evidence that every related process stopped.

Read these as three product cards, based on the documentation checked October 25.

Inspect and recover: Meta documents inspecting, editing and downloading files in Muse’s virtual machine, including memory.

Ask before adopting: The reviewed source does not establish exactly what context remains after disconnection, or the full deletion and backup-retention behavior. Ask for those answers for your setup.

Source: Meta’s Muse security and data policy.

Disconnect: New access stops; context already incorporated remains.

Inspect and remove: Individual dot memories cannot currently be viewed or directly modified. Deleting the dot removes its context, while artifacts saved elsewhere need separate handling. A dot-context export was not established in the reviewed documentation.

Ask before adopting: Can your workflow tolerate removing the whole dot when an individual retained detail needs to go?

Source: OpenAI’s dots privacy FAQ.

Disconnect: New access stops; earlier memory remains. The connection is shared with Claude, so switching it off affects both.

Inspect and remove: Duet uses Claude account memory. You can review, edit and delete memory topics or reset memory; memory data is included in exports. Deleting a chat does not itself remove memory derived from it.

Ask before adopting: Which account-level memories and connections does this task share with your other work?

Sources: Duet safety guidance and Claude memory documentation.

Find the retained topic, then inspect its contents. These two vendor-published screenshots show Claude account memory, which Duet uses. They are not Duet task screens or captures from our test.