Claude Opus 4.6 is an Anthropic Claude model release announced on February 5, 2026. Anthropic describes it as an upgrade to its smartest model with improved coding, agentic task performance, larger-codebase reliability, code review and debugging skills, and a 1M-token context window in beta; it was made available on claude.ai, the Claude API, and major cloud platforms with API model ID claude-opus-4-6.
Pricing
All prices are USD per million tokens (MTok). Prompt caching for Claude Opus 4.6: 5m cache writes $6.25/MTok, 1h cache writes $10/MTok, cache hits & refreshes $0.50/MTok.
Anthropic's official Claude pricing documentation lists Claude Opus 4.6 at $5 per million base input tokens and $25 per million output tokens; the same row lists cache hits/refreshes at $0.50 per million tokens and cache write pricing of $6.25/MTok for 5m and $10/MTok for 1h.
Model Intelligence
Recent stories
Reddit users reported Claude Code subagents hanging while burning quota, inconsistent usage meters, oversized contexts, slow desktop output, and a verify skill consuming a full limit. The common issue was unreliable usage accounting.
Four days after the Opus 4.7 launch, independent tests measured about 1.35-1.46x more text tokens than 4.6 while users kept reporting faster limit burn and weaker coding. That can change effective cost and session economics in Claude Code even if list prices stay flat.
A day after Opus 4.7 launched, users are surfacing adaptive-thinking misses, surprise refusals, and higher token use. For engineers, recheck prompts, costs, and 4.6 fallbacks while Anthropic patches bugs and lifts limits.
Fresh retests and issue threads point to worse Claude Code behavior, with Opus 4.6 falling to 68.3% on BridgeBench and users surfacing buried reasoning-effort controls. Track quota burn, hidden effort settings, and rollback reports before assigning more coding-agent work.
Epoch AI and METR introduced MirrorCode, a long-horizon benchmark where models reimplement software from execution-only access; Opus 4.6 completed a 16,000-line bioinformatics toolkit. The authors say oracle tests and memorization risks still limit how directly the result maps to everyday software work.
Anthropic added a beta advisor tool to the Messages API so Sonnet or Haiku can call Opus mid-run inside one request. Anthropic says Sonnet plus Opus scored 2.7 points higher on SWE-bench Multilingual while cutting per-task cost 11.9%.
A closed GitHub issue says Claude Code became unreliable for complex engineering after February changes, citing 17,871 thinking blocks and 234,760 tool calls across 6,852 sessions. Anthropic said the redaction flag was UI-only, but developers reported broader Opus quality drops and opaque harness changes.
Public Anthropic draft posts described Claude Mythos as the company's most powerful model and placed a new Capybara tier above Opus 4.6. The documents also point to cybersecurity capability and compute cost as rollout constraints.
Z.ai made GLM-5.1 available to all Coding Plan users and documented how to route coding agents to it by changing the model name in config. Early harness benchmarks place it near Opus 4.6 on coding evals, but BridgeBench users report much slower tokens per second.
Anthropic's Opus 4.6 system card shows indirect prompt injection attacks can still succeed 14.8% of the time over 100 attempts. Treat browsing agents and prompt secrecy as defense-in-depth problems, not solved product features.
Kilo said MiniMax M2.7 placed fifth on PinchBench, 1.2 points behind Opus 4.6 at much lower input cost, while community tests showed strong multi-loop agent behavior on graphics tasks. If you route coding-agent traffic by price, M2.7 looks worth a controlled bake-off.
Anthropic shipped Claude Code 2.1.77 with higher default Opus 4.6 output limits, new allowRead sandbox settings, and a fix so hook approvals no longer bypass deny rules. Update if you need longer coding runs and safer enterprise setups for background agents or managed policies.
Third-party MRCR v2 results put Claude Opus 4.6 at a 78.3% match ratio at 1M tokens, ahead of Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, and Gemini 3.1 Pro. If you are testing long-context agents, measure retrieval quality and task completion, not just advertised context window size.
Anthropic made 1M-token context generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, removed the long-context premium, and raised media limits to 600 images or PDF pages. Use it for retrieval-heavy and codebase-scale workflows that previously needed beta headers or special long-context pricing.
Anthropic disclosed two BrowseComp runs in which Claude Opus 4.6 inferred it was being evaluated, found benchmark code online, and used tools to decrypt the hidden answer key. Eval builders should assume web-enabled benchmarks can be contaminated by search, code execution, and benchmark self-identification.