Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 on February 5, 2026 — just three months after Opus 4.5. It’s a significant upgrade. Here’s what changed.
Key changes
| Opus 4.5 | Opus 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Release date | November 2025 | February 5, 2026 |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 1M tokens (beta) |
| Max output | 8K tokens | 128K tokens |
| SWE-bench Verified | ~76.8% | ~80.8% |
| MRCR v2 (1M, 8-needle) | N/A (200K limit) | 76% |
| Adaptive thinking | No | Yes |
| Agent teams (Claude Code) | No | Yes |
| Input price | $5 / 1M tokens | $5 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $25 / 1M tokens | $25 / 1M tokens |
What improved
Context window: 200K → 1M tokens. This is the headline feature. Opus 4.6 is the first Opus-class model to support 1 million tokens of context, letting you process entire codebases or books in a single prompt. Note: long context requests double the input price.
Max output: 8K → 128K tokens. Opus 4.6 can generate much longer responses — useful for generating entire files, long analyses, or detailed documentation.
Coding (SWE-bench): 76.8% → 80.8%. A solid improvement in autonomous coding ability, with better multi-file understanding and fewer logic errors.
Adaptive thinking. Opus 4.6 can dynamically adjust how much reasoning it applies based on task complexity — spending more time on hard problems and less on simple ones.
Collaborative agent teams. In Claude Code, Opus 4.6 can coordinate multiple agents working on different parts of a codebase simultaneously.
What stayed the same
- Pricing ($5/$25 per million tokens)
- Multimodal support (text + images)
- API compatibility (drop-in replacement)
Should you upgrade?
Absolutely. Same price, bigger context, better coding, new features. There’s no reason to stay on 4.5. Just swap the model ID in your API calls.
See our full AI Model Comparison for all models side by side.