On Thursday, Anthropic released the latest version of the 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 tried to expand the capabilities and appeal of its model, allowing for a greater variety of uses and customers.
Perhaps the most notable addition to the latest version of Opus is the inclusion of what the company calls “agent teams” — teams of agents that can break down larger tasks into segmented tasks.
“Instead of one agent working on tasks sequentially, you can split the work between multiple agents—each owning their part and coordinating directly with the others,” the company says. Scott White, head of product at Anthropic, likened the new feature to having a talented team of people working for you, noting that segmenting agents’ responsibilities allows them to “coordinate in parallel (and work) faster.” Agent Teams is currently available in an exploration version for API users and subscribers.
Opus 4.6 also comes with a longer popup window – meaning the program has the capacity to call up more information per user session. The new model offers 1 million context tokens, which is comparable to what the company’s Sonnet (versions 4 and 4.5) currently offers. These popups enable work involving larger codebases and can also allow processing of larger documents, the company says.
The new version of Opus also integrates Claude directly into PowerPoint as an accessible sidebar. This is a step forward from the previous integration of PowerPoint with a 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 a presentation can be created in PowerPoint with the direct help of Cloud.
White told TechCrunch that Opus has evolved from a model that was highly capable in one particular area — software development — to a program that could be “really useful for a broader group” of knowledge workers. “We noticed that a lot of people who are not professional software developers were using Claude Code simply because it was a really amazing tool to get things done,” he said. White added that the types of people the company has seen using it include not just software engineers, but product managers, financial analysts and people from various other industries.