NEWS

Claude 4.6 Opus Released: Everything You Need to Know

Anthropic drops Claude 4.6 Opus — a new state-of-the-art in reasoning and coding. Here's what changed, what it costs, and whether to upgrade.

NJ
Nathan JeanStaff Writer
March 1, 20251 min read
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Anthropic has released Claude 4.6 Opus, the newest and most capable model in the Claude family. In both internal benchmarks and third-party evaluations, Opus 4.6 outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro on coding, reasoning, and long-context tasks.

The biggest upgrade in Opus 4.6 is a 40% improvement on SWE-Bench Verified (real-world software engineering tasks), pushing its score to 72.5% — a new state of the art. On GPQA Diamond (graduate-level reasoning), it scores 71.9%.

Context window remains at 200K tokens. Pricing is $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens — unchanged from Opus 4.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 also received an update, offering much of the Opus reasoning improvement at a lower price point ($3/M input, $15/M output). For most production API applications, Sonnet 4.6 is the right choice.

Existing API keys and integrations require no changes — update the model parameter to claude-opus-4-6 or claude-sonnet-4-6 and you are done.

NJ

Nathan Jean

Staff Writer