Anthropic, at the center of concerns about an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software (SW) crisis, is amplifying the shockwaves by rolling out a more powerful AI model.
Anthropic said on the 5th (local time) that it will release Claude's top-tier model, "Claude Opus 4.6." This comes just a little over two months after it unveiled "Opus 4.5" at the end of November last year.
The most notable change in this version is the "agent team" feature, which allows multiple AI agents to be used at the same time. Moving away from a single AI handling tasks sequentially, it distributes work across several agents to perform in parallel.
Scott White, Anthropic's head of product, said, "Multiple agents can collaborate to handle complex tasks more quickly." If this feature is combined with "Claude CoWork," which was recently released and shocked the software industry, some expect AI to replace a significant portion of the roles played by existing enterprise SW.
According to Anthropic, Claude is being used not only by developers but also across various roles such as product managers and financial analysts. A notable point is that users without programming knowledge are actively leveraging AI based solely on their task execution abilities.
It is also being evaluated as outperforming competing models in terms of performance. According to benchmarks released by Anthropic, Opus 4.6 scored 1,606 on "GDPval-AA," which evaluates office and knowledge work capabilities, surpassing OpenAI's GPT-5.2 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro.
It also outpaced rival models on "BrowseComp," which measures information retrieval ability, with a score of 84%, and maintained a high level by exceeding 80% on the "SWE-Bench Verified" score, which evaluates coding ability. On the HLE metric—dubbed "humanity's last exam," a bundle of expert-level problems—it achieved 40% without using tools, which it said is the first among existing models.
Input capacity has also been greatly expanded. It can process up to 1 million tokens at once, enabling simultaneous handling of data equivalent to dozens of books. In addition, a feature has been added to link Claude with Microsoft (MS) Excel and PowerPoint so that AI performs everything from data analysis to presentation creation.
Claude Opus 4.6 is available starting today, and the developer API price remains the same at $5–$25 per 1 million tokens.