Anthropic has officially launched Claude Opus 4.6, a significant upgrade designed specifically for complex, multi-step “agentic” tasks. Moving beyond simple chat interactions, the new model introduces features that allow it to plan, act, and revise over longer sessions with higher autonomy.
Key Innovations in Opus 4.6
- 1M Token Context Window (Beta): The first Opus-class model to support up to 1 million input tokens, enabling the ingestion of massive codebases and long-form documents.
- Adaptive Reasoning & Effort Controls: A new
/effortparameter allows developers to choose between four levels (low, medium, high, max). This helps balance reasoning depth against speed and cost, making it easier to optimize for different types of tasks. - Agentic Search & Coding Performance: Opus 4.6 has set new records on benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 2.0 and BrowseComp, outperforming competitors in scenarios where the AI must use tools and navigate the web to find answers.
- Product Synergy: The model powers enhanced features in Claude Code (including an “agent teams” mode) and offers deeper integration with Excel and PowerPoint for automated data analysis and presentation generation.
Performance Highlights
According to Anthropic’s technical reports, Opus 4.6 demonstrates a qualitative shift in long-context retrieval, scoring 76% on the 1M-token “needle-in-a-haystack” benchmark. It also shows nearly double the performance in specialized fields like life sciences and root cause analysis for software failures compared to its predecessor.
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