Claude Opus 4.6 launched on AI Gateway on February 5, 2026, bringing two significant advances to the Opus tier. First, the context window of 1M tokens. This is the first time an Opus model supports this context size, matching what Sonnet 4.5 gained. For teams needing both Opus-level intelligence and massive context capacity, this closes a key capability gap.
Second, adaptive thinking: a new thinking type parameter (set as thinking: { type: 'adaptive' }) that lets the model decide when and how much to reason, rather than requiring you to specify a fixed thinking budget. Opus 4.6 also supports interleaved thinking and tool calls within a single response. The model can reason, call a tool, reason further about the result, and call another tool, all in one response rather than requiring separate turns. This matters for complex agentic workflows where the best next tool call depends on reasoning about previous results.
Anthropic described the model as built to power agents that handle real-world work, with strength across the entire development lifecycle. To use it, set the model to anthropic/claude-opus-4.6 in the AI SDK, Chat Completions API, Responses API, Messages API, or other API formats. When using the AI SDK, configure providerOptions.anthropic with the thinking and effort parameters as needed.