Anthropic Unveils Claude Opus 4.6 Amid AI Industry Shakeup

Anthropic’s latest artificial intelligence breakthrough, Claude Opus 4.6, is making waves across the technology landscape following its general release on February 5, 2026. The rollout, which began in GitHub Copilot and quickly expanded to other platforms, marks a significant leap in AI capabilities, enterprise adoption, and industry disruption — all at a moment when competition in the AI sector is reaching fever pitch.

According to GitHub’s announcement, Claude Opus 4.6 is now available to Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise users. The model can be selected within Visual Studio Code (across chat, ask, edit, and agent modes), Visual Studio (agent and ask modes), github.com, GitHub Mobile for iOS and Android, GitHub CLI, and the Copilot coding agent, though some features are limited to Pro and Pro+ accounts. The rollout is gradual, and enterprise and business administrators must enable the new policy in settings before users can access the model.

So, what makes Claude Opus 4.6 such a standout? Anthropic touts the model’s prowess in agentic coding — that is, its ability to not only generate code but also plan, reason, and coordinate across complex, multi-step tasks that previously stymied even the best AI assistants. As reported by VentureBeat, Opus 4.6 introduces a 1 million token context window, a technical milestone that lets the AI process and reason over exponentially more information than its predecessors. This means developers can now feed the model entire codebases, lengthy documents, or intricate project histories without losing track of context or detail.

Perhaps even more intriguing is the debut of “agent teams” in Claude Code, a research preview feature that enables multiple AI agents to work simultaneously on different facets of a coding project. “The new agent teams feature means users can split work across multiple agents — one on the frontend, one on the API, one on the migration — each owning its piece and coordinating directly with the others,” an Anthropic spokesperson told VentureBeat. This marks a shift from the traditional single-assistant paradigm to something closer to managing a team of autonomous digital colleagues.

The timing of Anthropic’s release is no accident. Just three days earlier, OpenAI launched its own Codex desktop application, a direct challenge to Anthropic’s momentum in the coding assistant space. OpenAI claims more than one million developers used Codex in the last month alone, and the new app aims to transform software development into a collaborative exercise with multiple AI workers. The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI — the two most valuable privately held AI companies — has escalated, with each racing to outdo the other in features, benchmarks, and enterprise traction.

Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 isn’t just keeping pace; it’s setting new standards. The company reports that Opus 4.6 achieves the highest score on Terminal-Bench 2.0, an agentic coding evaluation, and leads all other frontier models on Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-discipline reasoning test. On GDPval-AA, a benchmark for economically valuable knowledge work in fields like finance and law, Opus 4.6 outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 by about 144 ELO points, translating to a higher score roughly 70% of the time.

Enterprise adoption is surging. In November, Anthropic announced that Claude Code reached a $1 billion run rate revenue milestone just six months after becoming generally available in May 2025. Major companies have jumped onboard, including Uber, Salesforce, Accenture, Spotify, Rakuten, Snowflake, Novo Nordisk, and Ramp. This momentum has propelled Anthropic’s valuation skyward; earlier this month, the company signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation, as reported by Bloomberg. The company is also preparing a tender offer to allow employees to sell shares at this valuation, reflecting the dramatic rise in its worth since its founding in 2021.

One of the thorniest technical challenges in AI — the so-called “context rot” problem, where model performance degrades as conversations or documents grow longer — has been addressed head-on. According to Anthropic, Opus 4.6 scores 76% on MRCR v2, a benchmark for retrieving information buried in vast amounts of text, compared to just 18.5% for the previous Sonnet 4.5 model. The model can output up to 128,000 tokens, enough to handle substantial coding tasks or documents in a single go. New API features include adaptive thinking (letting Claude decide when deeper reasoning is warranted), four effort levels (to balance speed, intelligence, and cost), and a beta context compaction tool that automatically summarizes older context for longer-running tasks.

Safety and reliability remain front and center. Anthropic, known for its emphasis on AI alignment, reports that Opus 4.6 maintains low rates of misaligned behaviors such as deception or cooperation with misuse, while also achieving the lowest rate of over-refusals — where the model declines to answer benign queries — among recent Claude models. The company has developed six new cybersecurity probes to detect potentially harmful uses and is using Opus 4.6 to help patch vulnerabilities in open-source software.

The competition isn’t limited to the technical arena. The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI has spilled into marketing, with both companies planning prominent Super Bowl ads. Anthropic’s commercials poke fun at OpenAI’s move to test advertisements in ChatGPT, promising, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the ads “funny” but “clearly dishonest,” arguing that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI” while serving “an expensive product to rich people.” The exchange highlights their diverging strategies: OpenAI is monetizing its vast free user base with ads, while Anthropic focuses on premium enterprise subscriptions.

The financial markets have taken notice — and not always positively. Anthropic’s launch of new automation tools triggered a $285 billion rout in software and services stocks, with investors fearing that advanced AI could disrupt established enterprise software businesses. Major players like Thomson Reuters and Legalzoom.com suffered record single-day declines, while European legal software providers also saw their worst performances in decades. Not everyone agrees with the market’s pessimism; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called fears of AI replacing software “illogical,” and JPMorgan’s Mark Murphy noted it “feels like an illogical leap” to assume a new plug-in could replace mission-critical enterprise software.

Anthropic is also extending its reach into the Microsoft ecosystem, releasing a Claude integration for PowerPoint in research preview — a notable move given Microsoft’s significant stake in OpenAI. As an Anthropic spokesperson explained, “Any developer can build a plugin for Excel or PowerPoint. We’re participating in that ecosystem to bring Claude into PowerPoint. This is about participating in the ecosystem and giving users the ability to work with the tools that they want, in the programs they want.”

Enterprise AI adoption continues to accelerate. Data from Andreessen Horowitz’s January 2026 survey shows Anthropic’s share of enterprise production deployments has soared from near-zero in March 2024 to 44% by January 2026. In comparison, OpenAI remains the leader, with 77% of enterprises using its products in production. Average enterprise spending on large language models (LLMs) reached $7 million in 2025, up 180% from 2024, with projections of $11.6 million in 2026.

For developers, Opus 4.6 is available immediately on claude.ai, the Claude API, and major cloud platforms, with pricing unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Premium pricing applies for prompts exceeding 200,000 tokens. Anthropic advises users who find the model “overthinking” simple tasks — a side effect of its advanced reasoning — to adjust the effort parameter to medium, capturing the paradox of today’s AI: sometimes, less is more.

With Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic has not only raised the bar for AI performance but also intensified the industry’s race for innovation, safety, and enterprise adoption. Whether this marks a new era of productivity or a warning sign for traditional software firms, one thing’s clear — the AI arms race is far from over.