Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.6 with Extended Thinking
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.6 featuring extended thinking mode that allows the model to reason through complex problems step by step before responding. The model achieves 96.2% on GPQA Diamond.
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.6, a significant update to its most capable model that introduces extended thinking — a feature allowing Claude to engage in visible, multi-step reasoning before producing a final answer. The model achieves 96.2% on GPQA Diamond and 95.8% on MATH, setting new benchmarks for analytical reasoning.
Extended thinking works by allowing Claude to allocate additional compute to complex problems, reasoning through multiple approaches and self-correcting before delivering a response. Users can observe the thinking process in real time, providing transparency into how the model arrives at its conclusions.
The feature is particularly impactful for scientific analysis, mathematical proofs, and complex coding tasks. In internal evaluations, extended thinking improved performance on PhD-level science questions by 23% compared to the standard response mode, with the largest gains on problems requiring multi-step logical reasoning.
Claude Opus 4.6 also introduces improvements to instruction following, reducing cases where the model deviates from complex system prompts by 40%. The model shows improved calibration, meaning its expressed confidence levels more accurately reflect the actual probability of correctness.
The model is available through the Anthropic API and Claude.ai, with extended thinking accessible on the Pro plan. API pricing is set at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens, with thinking tokens billed at a reduced rate of $10 per million.
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