CLAUDE OPUS 4.6 LAUNCHES WITH 1M TOKEN CONTEXT WINDOW

Your phone buzzes at 9 AM. Claude Opus 4.6 just processed your entire quarterly report, identified three budget inconsistencies, and drafted a PowerPoint presentation fixing them. All while you grabbed coffee. Anthropic announced Thursday (Feb. 5) Claude Opus 4.6, a new version of its flagship artificial intelligence model that it described as a direct upgrade. The release comes with pricing that stays identical to its predecessor at $5/$25 per million tokens, but capabilities that feel like a generational leap. ## The Context Revolution Claude Opus 4.6 is the first Opus model to support a 1 million-token context window, available in beta through the company's developer platform. That's five times larger than before, meaning it can hold entire codebases, legal documents, or research papers in active memory. The practical difference is massive. Tested with the 'needle-in-a-haystack' benchmark MRCR v2, which tests model fact-finding, attention, and reasoning across long and complex prompts, Claude Opus 4.6 scored 76% compared with Claude Sonnet 4.5's 18.5%. This isn't just bigger memory. It's actually using all that information effectively. Claude Opus 4.6 can combine regulatory filings, market reports and internal data to produce analyses that would otherwise take analysts days. Financial modeling, legal research, and enterprise workflows all get the upgrade treatment. ## Agent Teams Change Everything The standout feature is Agent Teams. Perhaps the most notable addition to the newest version of Opus is the inclusion of what the company calls "agent teams"— teams of agents that can split larger tasks into segmented jobs. "Instead of one agent working through tasks sequentially, you can split the work across multiple agents—each owning its piece and coordinating directly with the others," the company says. Think less chatbot, more digital workforce. Scott White, Head of Product at Anthropic, compared the new feature to having talented team of humans working for you, noting that the segmenting of agent responsibilities allows them "to coordinate in parallel [and work] faster." The feature is slated to be available in research preview for API users and subscription customers. It's particularly powerful for code reviews and large-scale document processing. ## PowerPoint Gets Smart In addition, Claude Opus 4.6 will be integrated directly into Microsoft PowerPoint in a research preview. In that setting, the model can read existing slide layouts, fonts and templates, and then generate or edit slides in a way that preserves those design elements. No more copy-pasting between apps. Previously, a user could tell Claude to create a PowerPoint deck, but the file would then have to be transferred to PowerPoint to edit the presentation, White said. Now, the presentation can be crafted within PowerPoint, with direct help from Claude. ## The Security Wild Card Here's where it gets interesting. Claude found more than 500 previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in open-source code using just its "out-of-the-box" capabilities, and each one was validated by either a member of Anthropic's team or an outside security researcher. Anthropic believes Opus 4.6's capabilities will be a huge win for the security world, which has long struggled with how to secure open-source code that underpins everything from enterprise software to critical infrastructure. "I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of — or the main way — in which open-source software moving forward was secured," Graham said. ## The Market Reaction Software stocks aren't celebrating. Legal and financial analysis software stocks have plunged in recent days, bringing the broader stock market down with them. The Nasdaq just had its worst two-day tumble since April, and it's down another 0.7% Thursday. The release comes after software stocks cratered this week following the release of plugins for Anthropic's Cowork tool last Friday. These plugins, which let users tailor Anthropic's Cowork tool for specific industries like legal, finance, sales and marketing, sparked fears that the tech could replace specialized research and financial analysis software. Claude Opus 4.6 is available now through the Claude API, claude.ai, and major cloud platforms. Same price, radically different capability. The question isn't whether this changes enterprise work. It's how fast.