Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6: A Major Upgrade Focused on Coding, AI Agents, and Enterprise Workflows

On February 5, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable AI model to date and the first major frontier model launch of the year. This upgrade builds directly on Claude Opus 4.5 (from late 2025), delivering significant improvements in professional coding, long-horizon agentic tasks, reliability for complex workflows, and knowledge work across industries like software engineering, finance, operations, and research.

The model is now live on claude.ai (for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users), the Claude API, and major cloud platforms including Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry/Azure.

Pricing remains unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens for standard usage (up to 200k tokens). Premium rates apply for prompts exceeding 200k tokens ($10/$37.50 per million input/output), with options like prompt caching for cost savings.

Core Technical Advancements

• Context and Output Scale — Default 200,000-token context window, with a 1 million-token context available in beta for handling massive codebases, document sets, or long projects in one go. Maximum output per response reaches 128,000 tokens (double the prior Opus limit), enabling complete, exhaustive analyses, reports, or large code refactors without fragmentation.

• Agentic and Reasoning Enhancements — Opus 4.6 advances "agentic" AI with stronger long-horizon planning: it breaks down complex tasks into subtasks, runs tools/subagents in parallel, detects blockers more accurately, and sustains multi-step execution with minimal supervision. New "agent teams" let multiple Claude instances or agents collaborate on a single project—mirroring multi-agent patterns in emerging frameworks.

• Adaptive Thinking Modes — Users can control reasoning depth via an "effort" parameter or extended/adaptive modes, trading speed, cost, and thoroughness. Higher effort unlocks more powerful multi-step reasoning.

• Context Management — Automatic context compaction summarizes older conversation parts to fight "context rot" while retaining critical details—ideal for long-running agents and persistent projects.

Benchmark Leadership and Use Cases

Anthropic reports state-of-the-art results on agentic coding (e.g., top on Terminal-Bench 2.0), multidisciplinary reasoning (leading Humanity’s Last Exam), economically valuable knowledge work (outperforming rivals like OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 on GDPval-AA), and hard information retrieval (BrowseComp). The model excels at multi-step coding, debugging, research automation, financial modeling, cybersecurity analysis, and enterprise processes requiring deep reliability.

Productivity Tool Integrations

Deeper ties to business apps continue: Claude in Excel gains advanced spreadsheet automation upgrades, while a new Claude in PowerPoint add-in (research preview) allows direct slide drafting and refinement inside the app—no file switching needed. Anthropic positions Opus 4.6 as an "enterprise workhorse" for software teams, finance, operations, and knowledge workers needing dependable automation beyond simple chat.

For regulated sectors, US-only inference is offered at a modest premium to meet data residency and compliance needs.

Competitive Landscape

The launch arrives amid fierce rivalry with OpenAI and Google in coding, agent capabilities, and enterprise copilots. With no price increase but major capability jumps, Anthropic aims to make Opus 4.6 the go-to choice for teams developing production-grade AI agents, autonomous software tools, and sophisticated knowledge workflows.

Overall, Claude Opus 4.6 strengthens Anthropic's push toward reliable, autonomous AI systems that handle real professional workloads end-to-end—further accelerating the shift toward AI as a core collaborator in high-stakes domains.