Everything about Claude Opus 4.6

Claude Opus 4.6 at a glance

Claude Opus 4.6 is a language model from Anthropic, released on February 5, 2026. That makes it 8 months old as of October 22, 2026. Its weights are not published, so it only runs remotely, through the Anthropic API or partner hosts (41 listed on models.dev). It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money.

We file it under mid-range models (34 models in this category on the site).

Measured performance

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), Claude Opus 4.6 has a capability index of 76.7 out of 100, computed on 7 benchmarks from our basket.

It is not among the top 30 of the weekly ranking.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 90.5% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 94.4% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): 66% — the best tracked model, GPT-6 Astra, reaches 93.7%
• SWE-bench Verified (fixing real software bugs): 78.7% — the best tracked model, Claude Opus 4.7, reaches 83.5%

Pricing and budget

Claude Opus 4.6 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens (median of 41 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.15, or $150 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is 5.7 times the median output price of mid-range models ($4.38).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

What it can do

Its context window reaches 1,000,000 tokens, roughly 1,500 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough to load a whole book or a mid-sized codebase. A single answer can run to 128,000 tokens.

It accepts as input: text and image. Its knowledge stops at May 31, 2025: beyond that, it needs web search or your documents.

It can call tools (functions, APIs) and return structured JSON output, which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

What is it good for?

Given its category, Claude Opus 4.6 is mainly aimed at a balance between quality and cost, for everyday uses that do not justify a frontier model.

Its SWE-bench Verified result (78.7%, above the median of tracked models) makes it a serious candidate for coding agents.

Its very large context window makes it worth considering for analysing large sets of documents in a single request.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Comparable models

In the same category, the models closest to Claude Opus 4.6 are:

• Grok 4.3 (xAI, index 76.8)
• Gemini 3.5 Flash (Google DeepMind, index 76)
• GPT-5.1 (OpenAI, index 75.8)
• GPT-5 (OpenAI, index 75.3)