Claude Opus 4.5 just beat human engineers. Here’s what that really means

Anthropic has rolled out Claude Opus 4.5, its new flagship AI model that aims to be the everyday workhorse for serious coding, autonomous agents and boring-but-important office work like Excel sheets, slide decks and long research projects. It’s live today, cheaper per token than older Opus versions, and fully wired into Anthropic’s apps and developer platform.

What is Claude Opus 4.5 and where can you use it?

Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s new “top shelf” model in the Claude family. Think of it as the one you reach for when you want maximum reasoning power rather than just quick replies.

• Flagship model in the Claude line-up focused on deep reasoning and complex workflows
• Positioned as their strongest option for coding, agents and full computer workflows
• Available in the Claude apps, via API, and on all three major cloud platforms
• Priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens 

In practice, that means developers in the UAE can plug Opus 4.5 into whatever stack they already use – Claude’s own web and desktop apps, direct API calls, or through cloud providers that already sit next to their infrastructure. At this price, Anthropic is clearly trying to make Opus-level performance something you can actually afford to run in production, not just for weekend experiments. 

If you’ve already been playing with other agents and models – say ChatGPT 5 for general use in the UAE  or building workflows with ChatGPT Atlas as a browser assistant  – Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s answer for the “serious work” side of that same story.

How much smarter is it really?

Anthropic’s favourite flex: internal tests where Opus 4.5 does better than humans on a tough engineering exam the company uses for performance engineering candidates. Under a strict two-hour limit, the model scored higher than any candidate they’ve hired through that exercise. 

• Beats previous Claude models and rivals on real-world coding benchmarks
• Leads on their software engineering test, under the same time cap as humans
• Shows gains across vision, reasoning and maths benchmarks
• Stays on track better on long-running, multi-step tasks

Anthropic highlights a bunch of benchmark names – from industry coding suites to agent tests where the model has to act like an airline support agent without breaking policy. In one of those tests, Opus 4.5 doesn’t just follow the script; it finds a legal workaround by upgrading a ticket first, then changing the flights, staying inside the rules while still solving the customer’s problem. 

Benchmarks can be noisy, sure. But the pattern is clear: this model is tuned for multi-step reasoning and long tasks, not just pretty-sounding answers. For UAE teams building things like HR agents, finance tools or Arabic-first AI services (think what Shahbandr is doing with Arabic e-commerce AI  ), that kind of reliability matters more than a flashy demo.

Safety, alignment and being harder to “jailbreak”

Anthropic leans heavily on the “safety-first” branding, and Opus 4.5 is framed as their best-behaved model so far.

• Described as the most robustly aligned Claude model to date
• Lower “concerning behaviour” scores across categories like manipulation and misuse
• Stronger resistance to prompt injection attacks, based on external testing by security researchers
• Released under Anthropic’s stricter safety protections framework 

In more normal language: they’re trying to make it harder to trick the model into leaking sensitive content or following instructions that are buried inside prompts, documents or web pages. That’s exactly the sort of risk you’d worry about if you’re a UAE bank, telco or government department pointing an AI agent at internal systems – the same kind of environments we’ve seen with du’s AI video analytics push in the UAE. 

None of this makes Opus 4.5 magically “safe”, but it does mean Anthropic has numbers and tests behind the marketing line, plus a public system card with details for anyone who wants to dig deeper. 

New controls for developers: effort, tools, context and memory

Opus 4.5 isn’t just a bigger brain; there are new knobs for developers to control how it thinks.

• Effort parameter lets you trade speed and cost against depth of reasoning
• At “medium effort” it matches Sonnet 4.5 on a major coding benchmark while using far fewer output tokens
• At higher effort it outperforms Sonnet 4.5 while still cutting token usage
• New features around context compaction, advanced tool use, context management and memory improve long-lived agents 

This matters if you’re building agents instead of just chatbots. With more control, you can let Opus 4.5 think harder on a tricky refactor or financial model, then keep things cheap and fast for routine Q&A. Anthropic reports that combining these platform features lifted performance on a deep research evaluation by almost 15 percentage points – a hint at how important the “scaffolding” around the model is, not just the model itself. 

For UAE orgs already looking at “agentic” platforms – like Workday bringing AI agents for HR and finance to the region  – this kind of control over effort and memory is exactly what you’d want in production.

Claude apps, Claude Code and everyday work upgrades

Opus 4.5 also ships with very practical product updates across Anthropic’s apps and tools.

• Claude Code gets a stronger Plan Mode that builds a clear plan file before changing your code
• Claude Code is now available inside Anthropic’s desktop app for parallel local and remote sessions
• The Claude chat apps handle long conversations better by auto-summarising older context
• The Claude for Chrome extension is now open to all Max users
• Claude for Excel access is expanded to more paying tiers, making it easier to automate spreadsheets 

For anyone sitting in Dubai juggling decks, sheets and emails, this is where you’ll actually feel the change. You can let Opus 4.5 plan and execute a multi-step refactor, keep a long chat thread alive without context cuts, and use the same model to automate Excel hell. If you’ve already been playing with AI note-taking hardware like Plaud Note Pro in the UAE  , Opus 4.5 slots in as the software side of that same “take my admin away” trend.

FAQ: Claude Opus 4.5

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