Anthropic’s Cowork AI assistant made a big splash on Wall Street this week. Now, Anthropic takes another step forward, improving the model.
Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4.6 model, announced on Thursday, is designed to make Cowork AI more efficient for office and scheduling tasks, which could further raise concerns that the AI tool could replace specialized software that companies use for these tasks.
Shares of software companies for legal and financial analysis have plunged in recent days, dragging the overall stock market lower. The Nasdaq has just recorded its worst two-day drop since April and fell 1.59% at the end of Thursday’s trading session.
Many experts question whether AI will end up costing some workers their jobs. Tech giants like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are in a race to build AI models they hope will underpin the future of work.
a competitor to Anthropic, unveiled a new platform for creating AI agents designed to function as co-workers on Thursday morning. , in turn, launched the Cowork tool in January.
. Anthropic is betting that the new model will help replicate the huge success of the Claude Code software, but for other types of office work.
“We believe Opus 4.6 will be an inflection point for intellectual work in many ways,” said Dianne Penn, head of product management for research, in an interview with CNN International before the announcement.
What’s new?
One of these new features involves the way Opus 4.6 processes data. Anthropic claims to have expanded Opus’ context window, which is the amount of information a model can store at once, from 200,000 tokens to one million.
Tokens are a unit of measurement that refers to the ability of AI models to understand text. The longer and more complex a query is, the more tokens it requires.
According to Penn, giving Claude the ability to process more information simultaneously should allow him to handle more complex tasks, such as making sweeping changes to entire codebases.
With Opus 4.6, Claude will also be more efficient in knowing when to take more time to review a request and when to respond quickly.
Anthropic also claims that the new model outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model in a performance test that evaluates how AI handles intellectual work in areas such as finance and law.
The new PowerPoint integration, available in preview for researchers, will allow users to create slides using Claude, with AI able to read layouts and fonts to create slides that align with the desired corporate template.
Anthropic claims that the files that Claude Opus 4.6 works with, such as documents, spreadsheets, and slides, will be closer to being “production ready” on the first try, meaning they will require less human intervention.
While Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 makes Claude better at non-technical jobs, the update also includes some improvements for software engineers.
Coding tasks can be divided between teams of agents, rather than a single agent working on individual tasks, mimicking the way a human engineering team would operate, Anthropic says.
Impact on the software industry
The launch comes after software stocks plummeted this week, following the launch of plugins for Anthropic’s Cowork tool last Friday (30).
These plugins, which allow users to customize Anthropic’s Cowork tool for specific industries such as law, finance, sales and marketing, have raised concerns that the technology could replace specialized financial research and analysis software.
which tracks the software sector had its worst day since April on Tuesday (3), plummeting almost 6%.
At the same time, doubts and concerns are growing about the role of AI in the job market, especially in entry-level technology roles. Employment for recent computer science and mathematics graduates has fallen 8% since 2022, according to an Oxford Economics report last year.
A September study by Google found that 90% of technology professionals use AI in their work.
These types of concerns are “something we deal with and consider in every version of Claude and every product we release,” Penn highlighted, citing initiatives like Anthropic’s Economic Index report, which studies the impact of AI on the job market.
