Claude Platform Updates: 1M Context Window Now Generally Available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

The Claude Platform has announced the general availability of a full 1M context window for both Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 models, with standard pricing now applying across the entire window. This update brings several key improvements that will significantly benefit practitioners working with large datasets and complex tasks.

What’s New?

• One Price, Full Context Window:

  • No more long-context premium.
  • Standard pricing applies to the full 1M context window:
    • $5/$25 per million tokens for Opus 4.6
    • $3/$15 per million tokens for Sonnet 4.6

• Full Rate Limits at Every Context Length:

  • Your standard account throughput is now consistent across the entire 1M context window.
  • This means you can handle larger requests without hitting rate limits.

• 6x More Media Per Request:

  • You can now include up to 600 images or PDF pages per request, up from 100.
  • This feature is available on the Claude Platform natively, as well as through Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

• No Beta Header Required:

  • Requests over 200K tokens will work automatically without needing a beta header.
  • If you’ve been using the beta header, it will be ignored, so no code changes are necessary.

Enhanced Capabilities with 1M Context

A million-token context window is more than just a large number; it's about maintaining accuracy and recall across vast amounts of data. Opus 4.6 scores 78.3% on MRCR v2 (Multi-Reference Comprehension and Reasoning), the highest among frontier models at this context length.

This improvement means you can load entire codebases, thousands of pages of contracts, or long-running agent traces-complete with tool calls, observations, and intermediate reasoning-and use them directly. The need for lossy summarization and frequent context clearing is minimized, ensuring that more of the conversation remains intact.

Real-World Applications

Scientific Discovery

Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, Co-Founder, highlights how Claude Opus 4.6’s 1M context window and expanded media limits are revolutionizing scientific research:

"Scientific discovery requires reasoning across research literature, mathematical frameworks, databases, and simulation code simultaneously. Claude Opus 4.6’s 1M context and expanded media limits let our agentic systems synthesize hundreds of papers, proofs, and codebases in a single pass, helping us dramatically accelerate fundamental and applied physics research."

Code Development

For developers using Claude Code:

• Max, Team, and Enterprise Users: Opus 4.6 sessions can now use the full 1M context window automatically.
• Fewer Compactions: This means more of the conversation is kept intact, reducing the need for frequent compaction.

Implementation Details

• Pricing Structure:

  • The pricing remains straightforward with no additional multipliers for longer contexts.
  • A 900K-token request is billed at the same per-token rate as a 9K-token one.

• Rate Limits:

  • Your standard account throughput applies across the entire 1M context window, ensuring consistent performance regardless of the size of your requests.

• Media Handling:

  • The increase in media limits to 600 images or PDF pages is particularly useful for tasks that require visual data or extensive document processing.

Conclusion

The general availability of a full 1M context window for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 on the Claude Platform marks a significant step forward in handling large datasets and complex tasks. With no long-context premium, consistent rate limits, and expanded media support, practitioners can now leverage these models more effectively across a wide range of applications.