Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.6 as AI moves toward a ‘vibe working’ era

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Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 20, 2026.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

Anthropic on Thursday announced the launch of Claude Opus 4.6, its latest artificial intelligence model that’s better at coding, sustaining tasks for longer and creating higher-quality professional work products and outputs, the company said. 

Claude Opus 4.6 marks Anthropic’s first major model launch of the year, but it comes just months after the company released three others — Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Haiku 4.5 — late last year. 

Anthropic’s models are particularly popular with enterprise customers, which make up roughly 80% of Anthropic’s business, CEO Dario Amodei told CNBC last month. 

The company’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, as well as advancements within its productivity tool, Claude Cowork, have also started to spook software investors, many of whom are growing worried about the potential for disruption within the sector.

The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund is down more than 20% year to date. 

“Everybody has seen this transformation happen with software engineering in the last year and a half, where vibe coding started to exist as a concept, and people could now do things with their ideas,” Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product for enterprise, told CNBC in an interview. “I think that we are now transitioning almost into vibe working.”

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Anthropic was founded by a group of former OpenAI researchers and executives in 2021, and it’s best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude. 

The company assigns new numbers to the models as they advance across generations, but the largest model in the family is typically called Opus, the midsize model is called Sonnet and the smallest model is Haiku.

Anthropic said Claude Opus 4.6 builds on its predecessor’s coding skills and is better at planning, code review and debugging and operating reliably within large codebases. The model is also better at pulling relevant information from large sets of documents, doing research and running financial analyses, the company said. 

Claude Opus 4.6 now holds the top spot on the Finance Agent benchmark, for instance, which evaluates how well agents perform on core financial analyst tasks.

Anthropic said the model is available through its chatbot interface at claude.ai, its application programming interface and across all major cloud platforms. 

“If I think about the last year, Claude went from a model that you can sort of talk to to accomplish a very small task or get an answer, to something that you can actually hand real significant work to,” White said. “Opus 4.6 is a model that makes that shift really concrete for our users.”

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