Anthropic Unveils Claude Opus 4.6 Amid AI Industry Turmoil

On February 5, 2026, Anthropic shook up the artificial intelligence landscape with the release of Claude Opus 4.6—a major leap for its flagship AI model and a bold move in the ongoing rivalry with OpenAI. The launch, which rolled out in GitHub Copilot and across Anthropic’s own platforms, comes at a moment when the stakes for enterprise AI have never been higher, and the competition never fiercer.

Claude Opus 4.6 isn’t just another incremental update. According to VentureBeat, Anthropic’s latest model features a staggering 1 million token context window, letting the AI process and reason across vastly more information than any previous version. This means developers can feed Opus 4.6 huge amounts of code, documentation, or data—and the model can keep track of it all, maintaining peak performance without the dreaded “context rot” that’s plagued earlier systems. In fact, Anthropic reports that Opus 4.6 scored 76% on the MRCR v2 benchmark, a needle-in-a-haystack test for long-context retrieval, compared to just 18.5% for its predecessor, Sonnet 4.5.

But that’s not all. The release also introduces “agent teams” in Claude Code—a research preview feature that allows multiple AI agents to work on different aspects of a coding project simultaneously, coordinating autonomously. As an Anthropic spokesperson told VentureBeat, “Opus 4.6 is even better at planning, helping solve the most complex coding tasks. And 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.”

For enterprise users, these improvements are more than just technical wizardry—they’re driving real business results. According to Anthropic, Claude Code reached $1 billion in run rate revenue just six months after its general availability in May 2025. Major companies like Uber, Salesforce, Accenture, Spotify, Rakuten, Snowflake, Novo Nordisk, and Ramp have all adopted the technology for everything from software engineering to finance and trust and safety. This rapid traction has translated into skyrocketing valuations: earlier this month, Anthropic signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation, as reported by Bloomberg.

The technical benchmarks back up the hype. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, an agentic coding evaluation, Opus 4.6 achieved the highest score to date. It also leads all other frontier models on Humanity’s Last Exam, a complex multi-discipline reasoning test. On GDPval-AA—a benchmark measuring performance on economically valuable knowledge work tasks in finance, legal, and other domains—Opus 4.6 outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 by approximately 144 ELO points, which means it scored higher about 70% of the time.

The launch, however, didn’t happen in a vacuum. Just three days earlier, OpenAI released a new desktop application for its Codex AI coding system, aiming to transform software development from a one-AI-assistant exercise into something more akin to managing a team of autonomous workers. According to Andreessen Horowitz’s recent survey, 44% of enterprises now use Anthropic in production—up from near-zero in March 2024—while OpenAI remains the most widely used AI provider, with 77% of surveyed companies using it in production as of January 2026. The timing of Anthropic’s release—just 72 hours after OpenAI’s Codex launch—underscores the breakneck pace and high stakes of the AI arms race.

All this innovation is fueling a surge in enterprise AI spending. Data from a16z shows that average enterprise large language model (LLM) spend reached $7 million in 2025—a 180% jump from $2.5 million in 2024—with projections of $11.6 million for 2026. Anthropic’s own customer base reflects this trend: 75% of Anthropic’s enterprise customers are using its models in production, with 89% either testing or in production, rates that slightly exceed OpenAI’s.

Yet, the disruptive potential of these tools is not without consequences. On February 3, 2026, a $285 billion rout hit software and services stocks, a selloff that many investors attributed at least in part to fears that Anthropic’s AI tools could upend established enterprise software businesses. Goldman Sachs’ basket of U.S. software stocks sank 6%, its biggest one-day drop since April’s tariff-fueled selloff. The trigger? A new legal automation tool from Anthropic, which, according to Reuters, sent shares of companies like Thomson Reuters and Legalzoom.com tumbling by double digits, and rattled European giants such as RELX and Wolters Kluwer.

Not everyone is convinced the panic is justified. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called fears that AI would replace software “illogical,” and Mark Murphy, head of U.S. enterprise software research at JPMorgan, told Reuters it “feels like an illogical leap” to say a new plug-in from a large language model would “replace every layer of mission-critical enterprise software.” It’s a reminder that, for all the excitement, the path forward is still uncertain—and the market is watching every step.

Anthropic is also moving to integrate its models more deeply into the tools people use every day. The company has released Claude in PowerPoint as a research preview, allowing users to create presentations with the same AI capabilities that power Claude’s work in documents and spreadsheets. This integration puts Claude inside a core Microsoft product—no small feat, given Microsoft’s 27% stake in OpenAI. As Anthropic’s spokesperson explained, “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.”

Of course, all this progress comes with new challenges. Anthropic has built its brand around AI safety, and the company says Opus 4.6 maintains strong alignment with its predecessors, showing a low rate of problematic responses and achieving the lowest rate of over-refusals—where the model fails to answer benign queries—of any recent Claude model. The company has also developed six new cybersecurity probes to detect potentially harmful uses of the model’s enhanced capabilities and is using Opus 4.6 to help find and patch vulnerabilities in open-source software as part of its defensive cybersecurity efforts.

The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI is spilling over into the public sphere as well. Both companies are set to air commercials during the upcoming Super Bowl, with Anthropic’s ads mocking OpenAI’s decision to test advertisements in ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired back on X, calling the ads “funny” but “clearly dishonest,” and accusing Anthropic of wanting to control what people do with AI while serving “an expensive product to rich people.” The exchange highlights the fundamental strategic divergence between the two: OpenAI is moving to monetize its massive free user base through advertising, while Anthropic is focusing almost exclusively on enterprise sales and premium subscriptions.

As for developers, Claude 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). For those who find Opus 4.6 “overthinking” simpler tasks, Anthropic recommends adjusting the effort parameter from its default high setting to medium—an acknowledgment of just how powerful these models have become.

With the release of Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic has thrown down the gauntlet in the AI arms race, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible while raising new questions about the future of software, work, and competition itself. Whether this marks a breakthrough or a new era of disruption, one thing is clear: the pace of change is only accelerating, and nobody in the industry can afford to stand still.