Anthropic has announced a major update to its Claude Sonnet 4 artificial intelligence model, enabling it to process up to 1 million tokens in a single request. This fivefold increase in capacity allows developers to analyze entire software projects, review dozens of research papers, or process large document sets without breaking them into smaller chunks. Available in public beta through Anthropic’s API and Amazon Bedrock, the upgrade lets Claude handle codebases exceeding 75,000 lines, enabling the model to understand complete architectures and suggest improvements across whole systems instead of working file by file. Company sources highlight that beyond size, Claude Sonnet 4 achieves 100% accuracy in internal “needle in a haystack” evaluations, maintaining precision even with massive datasets.
The expanded context window addresses a long-standing challenge in AI-assisted development where large codebases previously needed to be divided into smaller segments, often losing key relationships between different parts of the system. Industry adoption is already taking shape, with platforms like iGent AI’s Maestro and Bolt.new reporting significant performance gains in large-scale, real-world coding tasks. The technology now enables full repository analysis, large-scale document synthesis, and context-aware AI agents capable of maintaining coherence across hundreds of tool calls and extended workflows. Enterprises are using the capability for applications ranging from financial dataset processing to contract analysis, where maintaining cross-document context is critical.
To support the additional computational demand, Anthropic has introduced a new pricing structure. Prompts of 200,000 tokens or fewer remain at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, while larger prompts now cost $6 and $22.50 respectively. Despite higher pricing than OpenAI’s GPT-5 in some scenarios, Anthropic argues that quality and usage patterns—especially with prompt caching—make the long-context feature competitive against traditional retrieval-based approaches. The company currently holds a 42% share of the AI code generation market, but heavy reliance on major customers like GitHub Copilot and Cursor poses revenue concentration risks, particularly given Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and potential competitive realignments.
The 1 million token capacity represents a significant technical leap, equivalent to processing around 750,000 words or multiple large novels at once. Anthropic’s internal testing confirmed perfect recall across diverse scenarios, although past incidents with earlier models have prompted the company to implement stronger safeguards. For now, access is limited to API customers with higher-tier rate limits, with Amazon Bedrock integration available immediately and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI pending. As AI capabilities expand, enterprises are increasingly shifting from simple chat-based assistance to autonomous systems capable of handling extended, complex tasks with minimal oversight. This development positions Claude as a powerful partner for industries beyond software engineering, offering new possibilities in legal, financial, and research domains while underscoring the need for robust safety measures as models grow more capable.
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