Anthropic unveils Claude Opus 4.5 with sharper reasoning and smarter memory

Claude AI

Anthropic’s latest foundation model, Claude Opus 4.5, arrives with a confident claim: it is the company’s most intelligent and capable system yet, and one that edges closer to the sort of intuition users expect from a human. It replaces Opus 4.1, which launched only a few months ago, but the company insists the step forward is substantial rather than incremental.

Early testing paints a clear picture, as per Anthropic. Internal teams found Opus 4.5 far better at unpicking ambiguous instructions and navigating messy real-world tasks that often trip up other models. It handled deep, multi-system bugs with a level of judgement that testers described as near impossible on earlier releases, including the well-regarded Sonnet 4.5. The recurring verdict was that Opus 4.5 simply understands what is being asked without excessive hand-holding, claims the company.

More capability usually means more computational demand, yet Anthropic says Opus 4.5 achieves stronger output while using fewer tokens. In practical terms, developers should be able to run sophisticated workloads at lower cost, which is vital as businesses scale up their AI use. With many companies now deploying models across teams and departments, small efficiency gains translate into meaningful savings.

There is also welcome news for engineers who rely on Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI-powered development companion. The tool has been limited to the web and mobile apps until now. That changes with the arrival of support inside the company’s native desktop apps, including the Mac version. It means developers can manage multiple local and remote sessions, update their projects and even troubleshoot across environments without hopping between interfaces. It is a small but important quality-of-life improvement for anyone who spends their day inside a terminal or IDE.

Long-running chats have long been one of the most frustrating parts of AI assistants, with even the strongest models hitting context limits. Anthropic has tackled this with a new system that quietly summarises older parts of a conversation as it grows. Instead of warning the user or dropping context suddenly, the assistant trims and reorganises the thread so the discussion can continue naturally. For users who rely on AI for research, writing or coding over many hours, this will feel like a relief rather than a technical constraint.

Claude Opus 4.5 is not a radical reinvention of what AI can do, but it is a confident step forward in areas that matter: cleaner reasoning, cheaper operation, richer development tools and more thoughtful handling of long conversations. In a market filled with impressive models, Anthropic is betting that intelligence paired with efficiency will be the combination that stands out.