On Thursday, Anthropic released the latest version of Opus, its most advanced model and a particularly important one for Claude Code. Opus 4.6 arrives just months after version 4.5 was released last November. With this update, the company has sought to broaden the model’s capabilities and appeal, allowing for a greater variety of uses and customers.
Perhaps the most notable addition is the inclusion of what the company calls “agent teams.” These are teams of AI 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. Scott White, Head of Product at Anthropic, compared the new feature to having a talented team of humans working for you. He noted that segmenting agent responsibilities allows them to coordinate in parallel and work faster. The agent teams are currently available in a research preview for API users and subscribers.
Opus 4.6 also comes with a longer context window, meaning the program can recall a greater amount of information per user session. The new model offers 1 million tokens of context, which is comparable to what the company’s Sonnet models currently offer. These expanded context windows allow for work involving larger code bases and can also enable the processing of larger documents.
The new version further integrates Claude directly into PowerPoint as an accessible side panel. This is a step up from PowerPoint’s previous integration with the chatbot. Previously, a user could tell Claude to create a PowerPoint deck, but the file would then have to be transferred to PowerPoint for editing. Now the presentation can be crafted entirely within PowerPoint, with direct help from Claude.
White told TechCrunch that Opus has evolved from a model that was highly capable in one particular domain, software development, into a program that could be really useful for a broader set of knowledge workers. He stated that the company noticed a lot of people who are not professional software developers using Claude Code simply because it was a really amazing engine to do tasks. White added that the kinds of people using it now include not just software engineers, but also product managers, financial analysts, and people from a variety of other industries.