Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.5 as Rapid Model Upgrades Continue

Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 4.5 on Monday, marking the AI lab’s third major model release in just two months and underscoring the accelerating cadence of frontier-model development.

The new flagship model is built for coding, computer use, and high-complexity enterprise work, targeting professional developers, data analysts, consultants, accountants, and other heavy productivity users.

The launch follows a wave of momentum for Anthropic. The startup — founded by former OpenAI researchers — recently secured new multibillion-dollar investments from Microsoft and Nvidia, lifting its valuation to roughly $350 billion.

Opus 4.5 succeeds August’s Opus 4.1 release and joins its sibling models, Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5, introduced earlier this fall. Anthropic says the newest Opus is “meaningfully better” at everyday tasks like managing spreadsheets, building presentations, and conducting deep research.

The model also posts state-of-the-art agentic coding performance, outperforming Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark. Anthropic says Opus 4.5 even outscored every human candidate on its internal take-home engineering exam.

Opus 4.5 is now the default model for all Pro, Max, and Enterprise customers.

Anthropic also unveiled several product updates:

• Claude for Chrome is expanding to all Max users.

• Claude for Excel is now generally available across Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.•

• Claude Code is coming to the desktop app alongside new developer-platform capabilities.

  
  

The rapid series of releases highlights Anthropic’s aggressive attempt to stay competitive in a year when model quality — and release frequency — are becoming defining battlegrounds in the AI industry.