On February 5, 2026, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, marking a significant leap forward in AI capabilities. This isn’t just an incremental update—it’s a model that’s redefining what’s possible in agentic coding, long-context understanding, and autonomous task execution.
What Makes Opus 4.6 Special?
1. Industry-Leading Coding Performance
Claude Opus 4.6 has claimed the top spot on Terminal-Bench 2.0, the premier evaluation for agentic coding. But what does this mean in practice?
- Better planning: The model thinks more carefully before acting, breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps
- Longer task persistence: It can sustain agentic workflows without losing focus
- Larger codebase navigation: Opus 4.6 handles massive codebases with ease
- Self-debugging: Enhanced code review skills help it catch its own mistakes
Early access partners have been impressed. As one developer put it: “Claude Opus 4.6 is a huge leap for agentic planning. It breaks complex tasks into independent subtasks, runs tools and subagents in parallel, and identifies blockers with real precision.”
2. 1M Token Context Window (Beta)
For the first time in the Opus series, Claude now supports a 1 million token context window. This is a game-changer for:
- Processing entire codebases at once
- Analyzing lengthy documents and reports
- Maintaining context across extended conversations
The model also shows dramatically improved performance on long-context tasks. On the MRCR v2 benchmark (8-needle, 1M variant), Opus 4.6 scored 76% compared to Sonnet 4.5’s 18.5%—a qualitative shift in how much context AI can actually use effectively.
3. Beating the Competition
Anthropic didn’t hold back in their comparisons. On GDPval-AA (an evaluation of economically valuable knowledge work in finance, legal, and other domains), Opus 4.6 outperforms:
- GPT-5.2 by approximately 144 Elo points
- Claude Opus 4.5 by 190 points
It also leads on Humanity’s Last Exam (a complex multidisciplinary reasoning test) and BrowseComp (measuring ability to locate hard-to-find information online).
New Features and Capabilities
Agent Teams in Claude Code
Claude Code now supports agent teams—multiple agents working in parallel, coordinating autonomously. This is perfect for tasks that can be split into independent, read-heavy work like codebase reviews.
You can take over any subagent directly using keyboard shortcuts or tmux, giving you full control when needed.
Adaptive Thinking
Previously, developers had a binary choice: enable or disable extended thinking. Now, with adaptive thinking, Claude decides when deeper reasoning would be helpful.
The model uses extended thinking when useful at the default “high” effort level, but you can adjust this to make it more or less selective based on your needs.
Effort Controls
Four effort levels are now available:
- Low: Quick responses, minimal thinking
- Medium: Balanced approach
- High (default): Extended thinking when useful
- Max: Maximum reasoning depth
Context Compaction (Beta)
Long-running conversations often hit context limits. Context compaction automatically summarizes and replaces older context when approaching a configurable threshold, letting Claude perform longer tasks without interruption.
Claude in Office Tools
Anthropic has significantly upgraded Claude in Excel, making it better at:
- Handling long-running and complex tasks
- Planning before acting
- Ingesting unstructured data and inferring structure
- Multi-step changes in one pass
They’ve also introduced Claude in PowerPoint (research preview), which:
- Reads your layouts, fonts, and slide masters to stay on brand
- Builds presentations from templates or descriptions
- Brings data from Excel to life visually
Safety First
These intelligence gains don’t come at the cost of safety. Opus 4.6 underwent the most comprehensive safety evaluations of any Anthropic model, including:
- New evaluations for user wellbeing
- Complex tests of refusal capabilities
- Updated evaluations of surreptitious harmful actions
- Interpretability research to understand model behavior
The model shows a low rate of misaligned behaviors (deception, sycophancy, cooperation with misuse) and the lowest over-refusal rate of any recent Claude model.
Pricing and Availability
Claude Opus 4.6 is available now on:
- claude.ai
- Claude API
- All major cloud platforms
Pricing remains unchanged at $5/$25 per million tokens (input/output). For prompts exceeding 200k tokens, premium pricing applies ($10/$37.50 per million tokens), available only on the Claude Developer Platform.
The model also supports:
- 128k output tokens for larger-output tasks
- US-only inference at 1.1× token pricing for workloads requiring US data residency
What Users Are Saying
Early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive:
“Claude Opus 4.6 is the best model we’ve tested yet. Its reasoning and planning capabilities have been exceptional at powering our AI Teammates.” — Devin AI
“Claude Opus 4.6 handled a multi-million-line codebase migration like a senior engineer. It planned up front, adapted its strategy as it learned, and finished in half the time.” — Replit
“The performance jump with Claude Opus 4.6 feels almost unbelievable. Real-world tasks that were challenging for Opus 4.5 suddenly became easy.” — Shortcut
Should You Upgrade?
If you’re working on:
- Complex coding projects requiring careful planning and execution
- Long-context tasks with massive documents or codebases
- Agentic workflows that need sustained focus over time
- Knowledge work in finance, legal, or research domains
Then Claude Opus 4.6 is worth trying. The combination of improved reasoning, extended context, and new productivity features makes it a compelling upgrade from previous models.
Getting Started
To use Claude Opus 4.6:
- Visit claude.ai or access via API
- Select the
claude-opus-4-6model - Experiment with different effort levels to find what works for your use case
- Try agent teams in Claude Code for complex, parallelizable tasks
For developers, check out the Claude API documentation for implementation details.
What do you think of Claude Opus 4.6? Have you tried it yet? Share your experiences in the comments below.
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