Anthropic has recently unveiled the latest addition to its lineup, Claude Opus 4.6, which is hailed as the most advanced model to date. This new model is specifically tailored for long-context reasoning, agentic coding, and high-value knowledge work. Building upon the foundation laid by Claude Opus 4.5, this new model is now accessible on claude.ai, the Claude API, and various major cloud providers under the unique ID claude-opus-4-6.
Unlike traditional models, Opus 4.6 focuses on agentic work rather than providing single, straightforward answers. It is engineered to handle multi-step tasks that require planning, execution, and adjustment over time. The Anthropic team has integrated this model into Claude Code, emphasizing its ability to tackle the most challenging aspects of a task, handle ambiguous problems with finesse, and maintain productivity over extended periods.
One of the key features of Opus 4.6 is its capability to delve deeper into problems and reevaluate its reasoning before delivering an answer. While this enhances its performance on complex issues, it may result in increased costs and latency for simpler tasks. To address this, Anthropic has introduced an /effort parameter with four distinct levels – low, medium, high (default), and max. This enables developers to strike a balance between reasoning depth, speed, and cost based on their specific requirements for each endpoint or use case.
In addition to coding, Opus 4.6 is designed to excel in practical knowledge-work tasks such as financial analyses, research involving retrieval and browsing, as well as document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation and utilization. When integrated into Cowork, Anthropic’s autonomous work surface, the model can seamlessly execute multi-step workflows across various artifacts without constant human intervention.
Opus 4.6 boasts long-context capabilities and offers developers enhanced controls. It is the first model in the Opus class to feature a 1M token context window in beta. For prompts exceeding 200k tokens in this 1M-context mode, pricing is adjusted to $10 per 1M input tokens and $37.50 per 1M output tokens. The model can support up to 128k output tokens, making it suitable for generating extensive reports, conducting code reviews, or executing structured multi-file edits within a single response.
To manage long-running agents effectively, Anthropic has implemented several platform features around Opus 4.6, including Adaptive thinking, Effort controls, and Context compaction (beta). These features aim to optimize the model’s performance based on task difficulty and context, provide a clear control surface for balancing latency and reasoning quality, and automatically summarize older parts of a conversation as a configurable context threshold is reached.
Opus 4.6 has been seamlessly integrated into Anthropic’s product stack, enabling it to drive more realistic workflows for engineers and analysts. In Claude Code, a new ‘agent teams’ mode allows users to create multiple agents that work in parallel and coordinate autonomously. This mode is particularly useful for read-heavy tasks like codebase reviews. Furthermore, Opus 4.6 enhances Claude in Excel by enabling it to plan before acting, ingest unstructured data, infer structure, and apply multi-step transformations in a single pass. When combined with Claude in PowerPoint, users can seamlessly transition from raw data in Excel to structured, on-brand slide decks that align with existing templates.
On external benchmarks, Opus 4.6 has demonstrated superior performance in coding agents, search agents, and professional decision support tasks. It outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and its predecessor, Claude Opus 4.5, in various evaluations such as GDPval-AA, Terminal-Bench 2.0, Humanity’s Last Exam, and BrowseComp. The model excels in long-context retrieval, as evidenced by its performance on the MRCR v2 1M benchmark.
In conclusion, Opus 4.6 is Anthropic’s most advanced model yet, offering a 1M-token context window, explicit controls for reasoning depth and cost, and exceptional benchmark performance. Its integration with Claude Code, Excel, and PowerPoint positions it as a versatile tool for practical engineering and analyst workflows. With its innovative features and impressive capabilities, Opus 4.6 sets a new standard for AI models in the industry.
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