Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 with 1 Million Token Context Window
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Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 with 1 Million Token Context Window

The new model sets industry benchmarks in coding and reasoning and introduces collaborative agent teams.

2/6/2026
Ghita Khalfaoui
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Anthropic has officially launched Claude Opus 4.6, its most advanced artificial intelligence model to date, setting a new standard for enterprise-grade AI. This latest iteration introduces significant upgrades, including superior coding abilities, enhanced reasoning for complex tasks, and a groundbreaking one million token context window in beta. The model is engineered to handle large-scale, high-complexity work with greater reliability, positioning it as a powerful collaborator for professionals across various industries.


A New Benchmark in AI Capability

Claude Opus 4.6 demonstrates substantial improvements in its core functionalities, particularly in agentic and coding tasks. The model exhibits more careful planning, sustains autonomous operations for longer durations, and navigates massive codebases with increased reliability. Its enhanced debugging and code review skills enable it to catch its own mistakes, a crucial advancement for AI systems tasked with complex software development and analysis, making it feel less like a tool and more like a capable partner.

The model's state-of-the-art performance is validated by its leading scores across multiple industry benchmarks. It has achieved the top position on Terminal-Bench 2.0 for agentic coding and leads in multidisciplinary reasoning on Humanity’s Last Exam. Notably, on the GDPval-AA evaluation, which measures performance on economically valuable tasks in finance and legal domains, Opus 4.6 significantly outperforms its closest competitors, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, underscoring its practical value in professional settings.

Enterprise Integration and Developer Tools

A key feature of this release is the one million token context window, a first for Anthropic's Opus-class models, allowing for the processing of vast information volumes without performance loss. Developers gain greater control through new API features like adaptive thinking, which lets the model decide when to apply deeper reasoning. Additionally, context compaction automatically summarizes older parts of a conversation, enabling longer-running agentic tasks without hitting context limits.

Anthropic is also deepening the model's integration into everyday workplace applications to boost productivity. Substantial upgrades have been made to Claude in Excel, enabling it to handle more complex, multi-step data tasks. A research preview of Claude in PowerPoint allows users to generate entire presentations from simple descriptions, while the new "agent teams" feature in Claude Code permits multiple AI agents to collaborate autonomously on software projects.

Advancing AI Safety and Alignment

Despite its significant leap in intelligence, Anthropic asserts that these gains do not come at the expense of safety. Claude Opus 4.6 has undergone the most comprehensive safety evaluations of any model from the company, showing a low rate of misaligned behaviors like deception or sycophancy. Its overall safety profile is rated as good as or better than any other frontier model, and it exhibits the lowest rate of over-refusals among recent Claude models.

Given the model's enhanced cybersecurity abilities, Anthropic has implemented new, specialized safeguards to mitigate potential misuse. The company has developed several new cybersecurity probes to detect harmful responses and is proactively leveraging the model for defensive purposes. This includes using Claude to help identify and patch vulnerabilities in open-source software, aiming to ensure that AI's defensive capabilities keep pace with potential threats in the evolving digital landscape.


The release of Claude Opus 4.6 represents a significant milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence, particularly for enterprise applications. By combining frontier-level reasoning, a massive context window, and practical integrations with a steadfast commitment to safety, Anthropic has delivered a tool designed for complex, real-world challenges. This launch not only pushes the boundaries of AI capability but also reinforces the vision of AI as a reliable and collaborative partner in the modern workplace.