Anthropic introduces the Claude Opus 4.6 model; New upgrades for Cloud Developer Platform, Claude in Excel and Claude in PowerPoint

Yesterday, Anthropic officially introduced the successor to its Opus 4.5 model- Opus 4.6, which is said to arrive with improved coding skills. It plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates more reliably in larger codebases, and has better code review and debugging skills to catch its own mistakes.

Introducing Claude Opus 4.6. Our smartest model got an upgrade.

Opus 4.6 plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates reliably in massive codebases, and catches its own mistakes.

It’s also our first Opus-class model with 1M token context in beta. pic.twitter.com/L1iQyRgT9x

— Claude (@claudeai) February 5, 2026

About Claude Opus 4.6

This model’s performance is state-of-the-art on several evaluations. It achieves the highest score on the agentic coding evaluation, Terminal-Bench 2.0, and leads all other frontier models on Humanity’s Last Exam. On GDPval-AA, Opus 4.6 outperforms the industry’s next best model (OpenAI’s GPT 5.2) by around 144 Elo points, and its own predecessor (Claude Opus 4.5) by 190 points.

Opus 4.6 often thinks more deeply and more carefully revisits its reasoning before settling on an answer. This produces better results on harder problems, but can add cost and latency on simpler ones. To avoid this, it is recommended to dial the effort down from high to medium.

Opus 4.6 can also apply its improved abilities to a range of everyday work tasks: running financial analyses, doing research, and using and creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Within Cowork, Opus 4.6 can put all these skills to work on the user’s behalf.

This model is much better at retrieving relevant information from large sets of documents, better at reasoning after absorbing the information, and has substantially better expert-level reasoning abilities in general.

Coming to its safety, it is revealed that on the company’s automated behavioural audit, Opus 4.6 showed a low rate of misaligned behaviours such as deception, sycophancy, encouragement of user delusions and cooperation with misuse. The company has included new evaluations for user wellbeing, more complex tests of the model’s ability to refuse potentially dangerous requests, and updated evaluations of the model’s ability to surreptitiously perform harmful actions. New safeguards are applied in areas where the model showed particular strengths that might be put to dangerous as well as beneficial uses.

Availability

Claude Opus 4.6 is available on claude.ai, Claude’s API, and all major cloud platforms. If you are a developer, use claude-opus-4.6 via the Claude API. It is priced at $5/$25 per million tokens.

Claude Developer Platform & Claude Code

On the API, some new features are introduced:

• Adaptive Thinking- Now Claude can decide when deeper reasoning would be helpful. At the default effort level (high), the model uses extended thinking when useful, but developers can adjust the effort level to make it more or less selective.
• Effort- There are now four effort levels to choose from: low, medium, high (default), and max.
• Context compaction (beta)- Automatically summarises and replaces older context when the conversation approaches a configurable threshold, letting Claude perform longer tasks without hitting limits.
• IM token context (beta)- Opus 4.6 is Claude’s first model with 1M token context. Premium pricing applies for prompts exceeding 200K tokens ($10/$37.50 per million input/output tokens).
• 128K output tokens- Opus 4.6 supports 128K output tokens
• US-only interface- Available at 1.1x token pricing.

The company has introduced agent teams in Claude Code as a research preview. Users can now spin up multiple agents that work in parallel as a team and coordinate autonomously.

Claude in Excel & Claude in PowerPoint

Claude in Excel handles long-running and harder tasks with improved performance, and can plan before acting, ingest unstructured data and infer the right structure without guidance, and handle multi-step changes in one pass.

Claude in PowerPoint is now available in research preview for Maz, Team, and Enterprise. Claude reads your layouts, fonts, and slide masters to stay on-brand, whether you’re building from a template or generating a full deck from a description. When paired with Claude in Excel, you can first process and structure your data in Excel, then bring it to life visually in PowerPoint.