Anthropic launches 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 launched last November, and with version 4.6, the company has sought 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 chunked jobs.

“Instead of a single agent executing tasks sequentially, you can split the work across multiple agents – each owning their own piece of work and coordinating directly with the others,” the company says. Scott White, chief product officer at Anthropic, compared the new feature to having a talented team of humans working for you, noting that dividing agents’ responsibilities allows them to “coordinate in parallel [and work] Faster.” Agent Teams is currently available in research preview to API users and subscribers.

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

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 ask Claude to create a PowerPoint deck, but then had to transfer the file to PowerPoint to edit the presentation, White said. Now the presentation can be drafted in PowerPoint, with direct help from Claude.

White told TechCrunch that Opus has evolved from a model that was highly capable in one area — software development — to software that can be “really useful to a broader group” of knowledge workers. “We noticed that a lot of non-software development people were using Claude Code simply because it was a really great engine for doing tasks,” he said. White added that the types of people the company has seen using it include not only software engineers, but also product managers, financial analysts and people from a variety of other industries.