Anthropic kills 1M context premium for Opus 4.6

Removing the long-context tax is a quiet but significant pricing move — it eliminates the biggest friction point for developers building agents over massive codebases or document sets.

• –Sonnet 4.6 also gets 1M GA at flat $3/M input, giving cost-sensitive teams a cheaper path to massive context without stepping up to Opus
• –MRCR v2 benchmark at 78.3% on the 8-needle 1M variant demonstrates real retrieval quality, not just raw window size — Opus 4.6 handles long context without the "context rot" that plagues smaller-window models
• –Cursor already dropped its 2x multiplier above 200K to match Anthropic's new flat rate, showing ecosystem pricing is quickly realigning
• –No code changes needed for existing API implementations — existing long-context users get the upgrade automatically
• –600-image/PDF capacity expansion opens document-heavy enterprise workflows (legal, research, compliance) that weren't practical before