Anthropic releases Opus 4.6 with new ‘agent teams’

On Thursday, Anthropic introduced the newest version of Opus, its most advanced model to date and a core component of Claude Code. Opus 4.5 was released only last November, and with version 4.6, the company aims to expand the model’s capabilities and overall appeal, opening it to a broader set of use cases and customers.

One of the most significant updates in Opus 4.6 is the launch of what Anthropic calls “agent teams.” This feature enables multiple AI agents to collaborate by breaking large or complex tasks into smaller, well-defined pieces that can be handled simultaneously.

“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 explained. Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product, compared the new capability to having a skilled team of people collaborating on a project. By dividing responsibilities among agents, he said, they are able “to coordinate in parallel [and work] faster.” The agent teams feature is currently available as a research preview for API users and subscribers.

Opus 4.6 also introduces a significantly expanded context window, enabling the model to retain and process more information in a single session. The updated version supports up to 1 million tokens of context, bringing it in line with what Anthropic’s Sonnet models (versions 4 and 4.5) already offer. According to the company, this larger context window enables work on larger codebases and allows analysis and processing of much larger documents.

Another notable enhancement in Opus 4.6 is deeper integration of Claude into Microsoft PowerPoint, where it now appears as an accessible side panel. This represents a meaningful improvement over earlier integrations. Previously, users could ask Claude to generate a PowerPoint presentation, but then had to move the file into PowerPoint to make edits manually, White said. With the new integration, presentations can be created and refined directly inside PowerPoint, with Claude assisting throughout the process.

Opus has evolved beyond a model that excelled primarily in one area—software development—into a system that is “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 user base now includes not only software engineers, but also product managers, financial analysts, and professionals across a wide range of other industries.