Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 — what it is, when to use it and what to use instead

Summary

Claude Opus 4.6 is a legacy Opus release from February 2026, at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens with a 1M-token context window. Its reliable knowledge cutoff is May 2025, the oldest in the Opus line together with Claude Opus 4.5.

Opus 4.6 was released on 5 February 2026 and has been succeeded three times since, by Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5, all at the same $5 / $25 price. Its reliable knowledge cutoff is May 2025, which it shares with Claude Opus 4.5 and which is a year behind Claude Opus 5.

It accepts text and image input and returns text. Adaptive thinking is supported and the manual extended-thinking mode is deprecated on this model; effort defaults to high.

No deprecation has been announced. Anthropic commits to keeping Claude Opus 4.6 available until at least 5 February 2027.

Modality

• Text
• Vision

Use case

• Chat
• Coding
• Reasoning
• Agents & tool use
• Long context

Tier

• Frontier

Access

• Hosted API

Languages

• Multilingual

Specifications

Input price

$5.00 / M tokens

Output price

$25.00 / M tokens

Price band

Premium

Context window

1M tokens

Max output

128K tokens

Input

Text, image

Output

Text

Knowledge cutoff

May 2025

Tool use

Yes

Structured output

Yes

Weights licence

not published

Model maker

Anthropic

“unknown” means the figure has not been published, or we have not verified it yet — never that the answer is no. “not published” under the weights licence means this model is not offered with downloadable weights. The price band is ours: it bands the blended price (three parts input to one part output) as budget (≤ $0.50), standard (≤ $3), premium (≤ $12) or flagship.

Lifecycle

Anthropic has not announced a deprecation or shutdown date for this model. That is a statement about what has been published, not a guarantee — providers typically announce a shutdown months ahead, and this page updates when they do.

1. Released 5 February 2026
2. Deprecated not announced
3. Retired not announced

Use it for

• Keep an existing Opus 4.6 integration running until you have evaluated a newer Opus release.
• Reproduce earlier results on a fixed snapshot where output has to stay comparable.

Avoid it when

• You are starting a new integration; Claude Opus 5 costs the same $5 / $25 and has a May 2026 knowledge cutoff against May 2025 here.
• Your prompts depend on facts after May 2025, which is this model's reliable knowledge cutoff.
• Your code uses manual extended thinking, which is deprecated on this model.

Alternatives to consider

• Claude Opus 5 Curated

  Anthropic ● Active

  The current Opus model at an identical $5 / $25, with a twelve-month-newer knowledge cutoff.

  $5.00 in · $25.00 out / M tokens · 1M context

• Claude Sonnet 5 Curated

  Anthropic ● Active

  The tier below at $2 / $10 with the same 1M-token context window and a January 2026 knowledge cutoff.

  $2.00 in · $10.00 out / M tokens · 1M context

• Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Curated

  Google (Gemini) ● Active

  Google's Pro-series preview at $2 / $12, which also accepts audio, video and PDF input.

  $2.00 in · $12.00 out / M tokens · 1M context

• Claude Opus 4.5 Derived

  Anthropic ● Active

  Same provider, same tier (frontier), similar price; shares chat, coding, reasoning, agents and long-context.

  $5.00 in · $25.00 out / M tokens · 200K context

• Claude Opus 4.5 Derived

  Amazon Bedrock ● Active

  Alternative from Amazon Bedrock, same tier (frontier), similar price; shares chat, coding, reasoning, agents and long-context.

  $5.00 in · $25.00 out / M tokens · 200K context

Curated suggestions were picked by a reviewer, with the reason written by hand. Derived suggestions are ranked from the data — shared tags, the same tier and a comparable price band — not from benchmark scores. Check the capability fit yourself: we track lifecycle, price and specifications.

Sources

• platform.claude.com ↗ https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/models/opus-4-6/overview
• platform.claude.com ↗ https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
• platform.claude.com ↗ https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/overview
• platform.claude.com ↗ https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/model-deprecations

Verified against the source on 10 September 2026. Dataset snapshot 10 September 2026. Providers can change a date without notice — the link above is always the final word.

About this profile

The specifications and dates above are facts from Anthropic, with the sources listed. The summary, the use-for and avoid-when lists and the curated alternatives are our assessment: editorial profile reviewed on 21 September 2026 by llm-researcher.