Another day, another new artificial intelligence (AI) model.
Anthropic on Monday announced Claude Opus 4.5, its most intelligent model yet and third major release in two months.
The AI powerhouse claims its latest offering excels at coding, computer automation, and complex enterprise tasks, positioning it as a direct upgrade for professional software developers, financial analysts, consultants, and other knowledge workers.
“Claude Opus 4.5 delivers high-quality code and excels at powering heavy-duty agentic workflows with GitHub Copilot,” Mario Rodriguez, chief product officer at GitHub, said in a statement. “Early testing shows it surpasses internal coding benchmarks while cutting token usage in half, and is especially well-suited for tasks like code migration and code refactoring.”
The launch follows Anthropic’s launch of Claude Sonnet 4.5 in late September and Claude Haiku 4.5 in October. The three models span different use cases across the development lifecycle: Opus serves production code and lead agents, Sonnet handles rapid iteration, and Haiku manages sub-agents.
Anthropic tested Claude Opus 4.5 on a demanding take-home exam given to prospective performance engineers to showcase its capabilities. The model scored higher than any human candidate ever has within the two-hour time limit, raising questions about how AI will reshape the engineering profession.
The company said it’s sharing this information to give workers, companies, and policymakers time to prepare, with its Societal Impacts and Economic Futures teams conducting research on the implications.
Early customer feedback highlights the model’s practical applications. Rakuten said Claude Opus 4.5 agents autonomously refine their capabilities, reaching peak performance in four iterations while other models couldn’t match that quality after 10. Financial modeling customers saw 20% accuracy improvements and 15% efficiency gains on internal evaluations.
Added Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, another Anthropic customer, “Opus models have always been ‘the real SOTA’ but have been cost prohibitive in the past. Claude Opus 4.5 is now at a price point where it can be your go-to model for most tasks. It’s the clear winner and exhibits the best frontier task planning and tool calling we’ve seen yet.”
In addition to its model launch, Anthropic introduced several product updates. Claude for Chrome, an extension enabling cross-tab browser actions, is now available to all Max users. Claude for Excel, which assists with spreadsheet understanding and editing, became generally available to Max, Team, and Enterprise users with new support for pivot tables and charts.
Claude Opus 4.5 will serve as the default model for Anthropic’s Pro, Max, and Enterprise offerings.
The company also eliminated context window limits for conversations, allowing Claude to automatically summarize earlier context so discussions can continue indefinitely.
The latest iteration of Claude comes days after Anthropic secured multibillion-dollar investments from Microsoft Corp. and NVIDIA Corp. that jacked its market valuation to about $350 billion.
