Anthropic dropped a significant infrastructure update today: the full 1 million token context window is now generally available for both Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, and for the first time, there's no premium for using it. A 900,000-token request costs the same per token as a 9,000-token one.
The 1M context window existed in beta, but it came with a 2x input and 1.5x output price multiplier above 200K tokens. For developers and teams doing serious long-context work — feeding entire codebases, processing stacks of contracts, running agents through extended tool-call chains — that surcharge added up fast and made real production deployment difficult to justify at scale.
That friction is gone now. Pricing for Opus 4.6 stays at $5/$25 per million tokens across the entire window. Sonnet 4.6 stays at $3/$15. No beta header required, no code changes needed. And the media limit has been expanded to 600 images or PDF pages per request, up from 100 — a 6x increase that meaningfully changes what's possible for document-heavy workflows.
Legal teams cross-referencing hundreds of pages of depositions in a single pass. Research operations synthesizing literature, data, and code simultaneously. Development agents that can hold an entire codebase in context without compacting and losing cross-file dependency awareness.
There's a competitive dimension worth noting too. Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro offers a comparable context window but still charges a premium above 200K tokens. OpenAI's strongest model, GPT-5.4, caps at 256K. Claude is now the only model family where both flagship tiers — Opus and Sonnet — offer 1M context at flat pricing. For anyone building serious applications that need scale and predictable cost, that's a meaningful differentiator.
The update is live today across Claude Platform, Microsoft Azure Foundry, and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Claude Code users on Max, Team, and Enterprise plans get Opus 4.6's 1M window by default.
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