Anthropic's most powerful Claude model is leveling up, with the company saying in a blog post Thursday that Claude Opus 4.6 will be even better at coding and creating projects on the first go.
Claude Opus 4.5 is already a robust coding model, with its November release sparking Claude Code's viral vibe-coding moment over the holidays. Claude's proven coding prowess and new Cowork feature have Wall Street anxious, with many tech stocks falling in recent weeks, over concerns that people won't need software products in the future.
Anthropic said the new model is more focused on solving the biggest challenges, such as the inner workings of complex apps, while also handling the simpler steps more quickly.
As a reasoning model, Opus 4.6 works by breaking down the steps it needs to take so that it can do what you ask and putting together a plan before starting. It'll also go back and check its work on those steps, sometimes making multiple attempts without you asking.
Sometimes the model can spend too much effort on a task, which Anthropic said can be resolved by reducing its effort level from the default "high" setting.
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The Claude Opus models are available for paying Claude users on the Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. The cheapest of those, Pro, costs $20 a month (or $17 a month if you pay annually). The Pro plan comes with usage limits for Opus, which users can hit after a few hours of vibe coding and then have to wait several hours for it to reset.
Aside from Opus, Anthropic has smaller, less powerful models in Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5.
A first look at Claude Opus 4.6
To test out the new model, I tasked it with creating a trivia app that operated by voice. This process took several iterations over about an hour, but Claude churned each one out pretty quickly. It was by no means autonomous -- I identified glitches and offered ideas for solutions, although some of my suggestions backfired as we ran up against the constraints of building entirely within an HTML file.
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