Anthropic makes 1M token context standard for Claude 4.6

Anthropic just significantly expanded how much information its AI models can process at once. The company announced that a massive 1 million token context window is now generally available for both Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6. This upgrade transforms what was previously an experimental or premium feature into a standard capability on the Claude Platform.

Breaking down the new pricing and limits

Earlier, pushing an AI model to analyze massive amounts of data in a single prompt came with a massive price multiplier. Anthropic is dropping that long-context premium completely. Standard pricing now applies throughout the 1 million token window.

For Opus 4.6, that means a flat rate of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Sonnet 4.6 sits at $3 and $15, respectively. Whether you are sending a short 9,000 token request or a massive 900,000 token document dump, the per-token rate remains the same.

Along with the expanded text capacity, Anthropic is significantly increasing its media limits. Users can now upload up to 600 images or PDF pages per request, a major jump from the previous limit of 100. This 1M context is available natively on the Claude Platform, and through Microsoft Azure Foundry and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

What this means for daily workflows

Well, a massive context window is only useful if the AI can actually remember and reason across all that data without hallucinating or losing track of the details. Anthropic notes that Opus 4.6 recently scored 78.3 percent on the MRCR v2 benchmark, demonstrating strong recall and reasoning at maximum capacity. This massive cognitive boost perfectly complements the company’s recent push to make Claude’s ongoing memory features free for everyday users.

What this really means is that users no longer have to manually chunk large files, rely on lossy summaries, or constantly clear the AI’s short-term memory. Developers can upload entire codebases to debug complex issues, while legal and financial teams can drop hundreds of pages of contracts or research directly into a single prompt to create interactive charts and data visualizations.

For Max, Team, and Enterprise users accessing Claude Code with Opus 4.6, this massive memory bank is now the default setting. That said, Anthropic has made Claude an appealing competitor against the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others.