AI company Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 this week, positing it as its most advanced AI model yet. The AI model is designed to be a business tool and offer new levels of reliability and precision to coding, agents and enterprise workflows.

Opus 4.6 builds upon the success of Claude Opus 4.5, launched in November 2025, with Anthropic stating it can plan more carefully, sustain agentic tasks for longer and operate more reliably in larger codebases. The AI model also has improved code review and debugging skills so it can identify its own mistakes.

Anthropic identified that its improved abilities can be applied to a range of everyday work tasks, including running financial analyses, undertaking research and using and creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

“The model’s performance is state-of-the-art on several evaluations. Opus 4.6 outperforms the industry’s next-best model … and it’s own predecessor,” Anthropic said this week. “[It] also shows an overall safety profile as good as, or better than, any other frontier model in the industry, with low rates of misaligned behaviour across safety evaluations.”

Anthropic said the company was also introducing ‘adaptive thinking’ to Claude, where the AI model can pick up on contextual clues about how much to use its extended thinking, in addition to new effort controls to give developers more control over intelligence, speed and cost.

AI agent interest is soaring already in 2026, with Anthropic competitors racing to launch these systems.

This week, OpenAI launched the Codex app, a new interface designed to manage multiple agents at once, run work in parallel and collaborate with agents over long-running tasks.

Company CEO Sam Altman said that “code plus generalised computer” use is even more powerful.

“Given an AI agent full access to your computer and your web browser with all your sessions leads to incredible stuff – and that seems here to stay,” he said at the Cisco AI Summit on Tuesday. “OpenAI did an incredible job of bringing many ideas together to make that feel useable and real. That seems certain to be part of our future.”

Claude Opus 4.6 is also launched amid a backdrop of surging AI investment, which has led to supply chain constraints across the technology industry.

Capacity shared reports this morning that a mad dash for AI chips has led to the struggles, with Intel prices soaring and AMD experiencing order delays. CPU and memory chip shortages are also ongoing, on account of rising AI demand.

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