On Thursday, Anthropic introduced the newest iteration of Opus, its most sophisticated model and a key component of Claude Code. Opus 4.5 had just launched in November, and with version 4.6, the company aimed to expand the model's functionality and reach, making it suitable for a wider array of applications and users.

A particularly significant enhancement in this update is the introduction of "agent teams." These are groups of agents designed to break down complex tasks into smaller, manageable parts. The company explains that rather than a single agent handling everything step-by-step, the work can be distributed across multiple agents, with each focusing on its assigned segment and collaborating directly with the others. Scott White, Anthropic's Head of Product, likened this feature to having a skilled human team at your disposal, emphasizing that dividing responsibilities allows the agents "to coordinate in parallel [and work] faster." For now, the agent teams feature is accessible in a research preview for API users and subscribers.

Opus 4.6 also features an extended context window, increasing the program's ability to retain more information during a user session. This new model supports 1 million tokens of context, matching the capacity currently offered by the company's Sonnet models, versions 4 and 4.5. According to the company, these expanded context windows enable work with more extensive codebases and facilitate the processing of larger documents.

Additionally, the latest Opus version integrates Claude directly into PowerPoint as an easily accessible side panel. This represents an improvement over the previous integration with the chatbot. Scott White noted that before, users could instruct Claude to generate a PowerPoint deck, but the file then had to be moved into PowerPoint for editing. Now, presentations can be created and refined entirely within PowerPoint, with Claude providing direct assistance.

"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," White remarked. He added that the user base has expanded beyond software engineers to include product managers, financial analysts, and professionals from various other industries.