Anthropic releases Opus 4.6 with new ‘agent teams’

On Thursday, Anthropic released the latest version of Opus — its most advanced model and a particularly important model for Claude Code. Opus 4.5 was only released last November, and with 4.6, the company has sought to broaden its model’s capabilities and appeal, allowing for a greater variety of uses and customers.

Perhaps the most notable addition to the newest version of Opus is the inclusion of what the company calls “agent teams” — teams of agents that can split larger tasks into segmented jobs.

“Instead of one agent working through tasks sequentially, you can split the work across multiple agents — each owning its piece and coordinating directly with the others,” the company says. Scott White, Head of Product at Anthropic, compared the new feature to having a talented team of humans working for you, noting that the segmenting of agent responsibilities allows them “to coordinate in parallel [and work] faster.” The agent teams are currently available in a research preview for API users and subscribers.

Opus 4.6 also comes with a longer context window — meaning that the program has a capacity to recall a greater amount of information per user session. The new model offers 1 million tokens of context, which is comparable to what the company’s Sonnet (versions 4 and 4.5) currently offers. Those context windows allow for work involving larger code bases and can also allow for the processing of larger documents, the company says.

The new version of Opus also integrates Claude directly into PowerPoint as an accessible side panel. This is a step up from PowerPoint’s previous integration with the chatbot. Previously, a user could tell Claude to create a PowerPoint deck, but the file would then have to be transferred to PowerPoint to edit the presentation, White said. Now the presentation can be crafted within PowerPoint, with direct help from Claude.

White told TechCrunch that Opus has evolved from a model that was highly capable in one particular domain — software development — into a program that could be “really useful for a broader set” of knowledge workers. “We noticed a lot of people who are not professional software developers using Claude Code simply because it was a really amazing engine to do tasks,” he said. White added that the kinds of people the company has seen using it include not just software engineers, but product managers, financial analysts, and people from a variety of other industries.