Claude 4.6: What you need to know about Anthropic's AI models and chatbot

I've been using Claude long enough to remember when the main selling point was that it was a nicer chatbot to talk to than the alternatives. (That's still true, for what it's worth.) But Claude no longer just talks to you about your work; it also does your work for you. You can give Claude a project, head off to make a coffee, and check in occasionally when questions pop up.

For enterprises looking to turn AI hype into real productivity gains, Claude has become the default choice. And Claude is equally popular at smaller companies among developers, writers, and teams who just want an AI that can handle genuinely complex work.

In this article, I'll explore what makes Claude a powerhouse in enterprise AI and a favorite among professionals who want an AI that actually does things.

Table of contents:

• What is Claude?

• What makes Claude great?

• How to try Claude for yourself

• Automate Claude with Zapier

What is Claude?

Claude is a family of large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic, a company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. Anthropic centers its development of Claude around a constitution that guides Claude during the training process to prioritize safe, ethical, and helpful AI interactions.

Claude is also the name of the AI chatbot built on top of these models. It's a general-purpose assistant that can handle tasks like writing, analysis, coding, and reasoning.

Claude's model family: Sonnet, Haiku, Opus

Anthropic offers three main model variants, each with different performance characteristics and price points.

• Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now considered by Anthropic to be the best model for all-around performance. Opus still has an edge on the most complex tasks, but at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, Sonnet is the best default model for most users due to its balance of performance and cost.

• Claude Opus 4.6 is preferred by many developers for complex and agentic coding tasks, and it's been noted for its performance on financial and legal tasks. It's well-suited to research and enterprise applications that need maximum performance. At $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, it's pricier, so it's best for complex tasks where accuracy is more important than speed or cost.

• Claude Haiku 4.5 is optimized for speed and affordability. It costs just $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. Haiku can be a good choice for time-sensitive use cases like customer service or for affordably processing lots of data.

Claude API pricing

How to access Claude

If you're using Claude's free plan, you get limited usage of Sonnet and Haiku. Claude Pro, at $20/month, gives you access to Opus along with features like Claude Code, Cowork, and Research. If you're a power user, Claude's $100/month Max 5x plan increases your usage limit by another 5x (you can also pay $200/month to increase your limit by 20x).

You can also access all of these state-of-the-art models on Zapier, bringing the power of Claude's AI into all the apps you already use. And with Zapier MCP, you can access your entire tech stack straight from Claude.

What makes Claude great?

Claude is best for use cases like coding, deep reasoning, nuanced content creation, and privacy-focused enterprise applications. Here are the features that help Claude stand out.

Artifacts

Claude's Artifacts let you build interactive apps, tools, or content. They're generated automatically if your content is long enough (over 15 lines), especially if Claude thinks you might want to edit, share, reuse, or reference that content later. Artifacts open up in a split screen, which makes it easy to continue iterating by conversing with Claude, and they can be used to create things like data visualizations, small web apps, games, interactive React components, code snippets, or documents.

You might be surprised how useful this is for satisfying your everyday curiosity. Seriously: ask Claude to generate data visualizations for random questions and see what happens. It still blows my mind that from the comfort of my couch, I can ask Claude for "an interactive visualization showing which countries export the most bananas per capita" and get a masterpiece like the chart below, complete with one-click filters and expandable detail panels.

But React-powered interactive charts and graphs are just the start. Anthropic now allows you to create AI-powered artifacts and share them publicly without worrying about blowing up your API budget, since users have to authenticate with their Claude account and are responsible for their own usage. 

That means it's easier than ever to create a Claude-hosted app for team productivity, language learning, or goofy multiplayer games.

Research and extended thinking

All of the leading LLMs now have some form of "deep thinking" mode. Claude offers two variations: research and extended thinking mode.

Like ChatGPT's Deep Research, Claude's Research feature looks through dozens (and often hundreds) of sources to create comprehensive reports addressing nuanced requests. For example, I asked Claude to do a comprehensive review of Alaska Inner Passage cruise options, specified a few parameters, and got a thoroughly-researched recommendation in ten minutes.

What's especially neat is that Claude automatically takes a multi-agent research approach to speed things up. It starts by mapping out a research plan, then delegates each task to a different subagent so that Claude can investigate each thread of research simultaneously.

Extended thinking mode, on the other hand, isn't intended for ultra-comprehensive research reports. Instead, it employs a kind of "hybrid reasoning" approach that lets the AI either respond almost instantly or take time to reason step-by-step before answering. 

When your question can be accurately handled by quickly pulling from its training data, Claude will tell you.

And when you ask a question that requires analysis, probabilities, and complex ethical or societal considerations, Claude will ponder your question a bit longer and tell you what it's doing.

Projects and Skills

Claude's Projects feature isn't as groundbreaking now as when it first came out—ChatGPT now offers something similar—but it's still super helpful. With Projects, you get consistent, tailored responses across interactions without constant re-prompting.

For example, let's say you use Claude to write captions for your business's social media posts. Unless you copy and paste the same prompt and include detailed instructions, you're likely to end up with a different brand voice and formatting each time. Projects lets you anchor all of your chat activity with the same instructions and long-term memory context, while also uploading materials to a persistent file archive so Claude knows everything it needs to know about your business.

Projects is great for consistently referencing the same context and background knowledge. But if you're looking to define a repeatable process, that's when you'll want to reach for Claude Skills.

A Skill is a reusable set of instructions that outlines the process and output format Claude should adhere to. Want Claude to always draft newsletters in the same way, or follow a specific editing checklist when you share a draft? That's a Skill. You can build your own by simply asking Claude to help you build a Skill, which will trigger—you guessed it—a skill-creator Skill to walk you through the process.

Skills and Projects work best together. Use Projects as a container to hold the context of what you're working on, and use Skills to help you take action in a predictable, repeatable way.

Personality

No, personality isn't actually a feature. But you might be surprised at how often this comes up when people talk about why they use Claude. As Eric Simons, CEO and co-founder of StackBlitz, says: "Sonnet is just more fun and friendlier which goes a long way. It tries to empathize in a way that's not obviously robot fake."

While each new AI model inevitably benchmarks its performance against older models (now 5% better at math!), they're all incredibly powerful at this point, which means the subjective experience of interacting with them is a kind of X-factor that can tip the scales. This makes sense: if you're spending all day brainstorming with bots, you want the experience to be pleasant.

For me, Claude is hands down the best AI to have a conversation with. ChatGPT somehow sounds both robotic and overenthusiastic, and Grok has plenty of personality but goes a little overboard. Claude, on the other hand, manages to bring emotion to the conversation in a way that's believable.

Claude Code

Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool, is wildly popular for coding among developers and enterprises: as of December 2025, it had a 54% coding market share, compared to 21% for OpenAI and 11% for Gemini.

Rather than simply autocompleting lines of code, Claude Code can take on entire projects autonomously. Just give Claude your vision ("build me an iOS app that tracks blimps"), and it'll take all the necessary steps to plan and execute it, while checking in occasionally for questions along the way.

Claude Code's hours-long autonomous projects are made possible through a couple of innovations. Compaction allows Claude to summarize its own progress so it doesn't hit a context wall, and agent teams coordinate multiple Claude instances that work in parallel on parts of a larger task. And since Sonnet 4.6 now has a 1M token context window, it can hold entire codebases, meaning Claude can understand the entire context of your project without issue.

Developers can use Claude Code in a terminal, but even non-technical users can try it out using Claude's desktop app or web app.

For a full guide on getting started, check out our Claude Code guide.

Claude Cowork

With Cowork, accessed via Claude's desktop app, Claude can now do actual work on your computer. Just describe the outcome you want—like pulling data from a bunch of PDFs into a spreadsheet—and instruct Claude to handle it for you. Much like Claude Code, Cowork makes a plan, breaks it into steps, and does the work while you watch. It runs in a sandboxed environment, which means it can only take action within the folders you specify.

So far, Anthropic's main use cases for Cowork involve admin tasks like organizing files, reconciling transactions, and streamlining onboarding. If you're used to procrastinating by organizing your desktop files and folders, you'll have to find a new pastime: Claude Cowork can do it in 30 seconds. As Cowork's scope grows, it's easy to imagine it expanding into an ever-wider range of tasks.

How to try Claude for yourself

For access, sign up at Claude.ai. From there, you can start a conversation or use one of Claude's default prompts to get started. As a free user, you'll get access to Claude Sonnet 4.6, plus limited use of Opus 4.6. Upgrading to one of Claude's paid plans (starting at $20/month) gives you access to additional models (including Haiku 4.5) and priority access even during times of high traffic.

You can also download Claude's desktop app for macOS or Windows, which streamlines access to Claude Cowork and Claude Code.

Automate Claude with Zapier

If you decide to use Claude as your AI chatbot of choice, you can connect it to Zapier, so you can initiate conversations in Claude whenever you take specific actions in your other apps. Zapier offers access to the latest Claude models immediately, so you're always using state-of-the-art AI in your workflows.

Build solutions in minutes and solve tough challenges with AI and automation. Learn more about how to automate Claude with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made templates.

Anthropic also developed the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows you to take action in other apps straight from Claude. With Zapier MCP, you can access your entire tech stack from Claude, no code required. Learn more about how to empower Claude to work across your apps with Zapier.

Related reading:

• What is Llama and why does it matter?

• What is Google Gemini?

• What is Sora? OpenAI's text-to-video model

• What is Perplexity AI?

• What are Claude computer use and OpenAI Operator?

• What are Claude Skills?

• What is Claude Cowork?

This article was originally published in September 2023. The most recent update was in February 2026.