Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.6, a more powerful AI model built for coding, finance, and enterprise work

Anthropic on Thursday rolled out Claude Opus 4.6, its newest and most advanced AI model, pitching it as a system that can handle longer assignments, handle deeper code work, and deliver professional-grade outputs that go beyond quick answers and short prompts. The release sends a clear signal to enterprise customers and to software markets watching closely.

Opus 4.5 only landed last November. With 4.6, Anthropic is pushing further, broadening the model’s scope and aiming to make it useful across a wider range of workflows and customer use cases.

Claude Opus 4.6 arrives as Anthropic doubles down on enterprise AI and long-running tasks

The timing matters as much as the capability. This marks Anthropic’s first major model launch of the year, coming just months after the company shipped Claude Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and Haiku 4.5 late last year. The pace reflects how quickly expectations around AI tools have shifted, particularly inside large organizations that want systems they can trust with real work.

Enterprise customers sit at the center of that shift. Roughly 80% of Anthropic’s business comes from companies, according to CEO Dario Amodei, who spoke with CNBC last month. Those customers are pushing AI past chat and into planning, review, analysis, and execution.

That pressure is starting to ripple through the software market. Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, along with upgrades to its productivity system, Claude Cowork, has unsettled investors who see parts of the traditional software stack under threat. The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund is down more than 20% year to date, a reminder that Wall Street is paying attention to how fast AI tools are absorbing tasks once owned by standalone apps.

“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. “I think that we are now transitioning almost into vibe working.”

Anthropic’s roots help explain why the company keeps leaning into this direction. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers and executives, the company has built the Claude family with a clear internal hierarchy. Opus sits at the top as the largest and most capable model, Sonnet fills the middle tier, and Haiku covers lighter use cases.

With version 4.6, Opus pushes further into the territory that enterprises care about most. Anthropic says the model shows gains in planning, code review, debugging, and reliability inside large codebases. It can pull relevant material from large document collections, support research workflows, and handle financial analysis with greater consistency.

Those claims are backed by benchmark results that Anthropic is willing to put front and center. Claude Opus 4.6 now leads the Finance Agent benchmark, which tests how well AI agents perform tasks expected of human financial analysts.

The model is available through Anthropic’s chatbot at claude.ai, through its API, and across major cloud platforms, making it easier for companies to plug it into existing systems without reworking their infrastructure.

“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.”

What stands out is less the feature list and more the message behind it. Anthropic is framing Claude Opus 4.6 as a step away from AI as a helper and closer to AI as a worker. That framing helps explain why enterprises are leaning in — and why parts of the software market are starting to look uneasy.