Anthropic walked away from the Pentagon

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Opus 4.6 now defaults to medium effort, Opus 4 and 4.1 retired

If you're on a Max or Team plan, Opus 4.6 now runs at medium effort by default -- a balance between speed and thoroughness that Anthropic says works well for most tasks. You can override this anytime with /model. If you had Opus 4 or 4.1 pinned, you've been automatically migrated to 4.6. The "ultrathink" keyword is back if you want to force high effort on a specific turn.

Worth Knowing

New /loop command runs prompts on a recurring interval

You can now schedule recurring prompts within a session using /loop. Run /loop 5m check the deploy and Claude will execute that prompt every five minutes until you stop it. Cron scheduling tools are also available for more complex recurring patterns.

VS Code gets a session list, plan viewer, and MCP management

If you use VS Code, there's now a spark icon in the activity bar that lists all your Claude Code sessions, with each opening as a full editor tab. Plans render as full markdown documents where you can add comments to guide Claude. You can also manage MCP servers directly from the chat panel with /mcp -- enabling, disabling, reconnecting, and handling OAuth without switching to the terminal.

Voice mode adds 10 new languages and a rebindable push-to-talk key

Voice mode now supports 20 languages total, adding Russian, Polish, Turkish, Dutch, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. You can also rebind the push-to-talk key in keybindings.json via the voice:pushToTalk setting -- modifier combos like meta+k avoid interfering with normal typing.

New settings to strip git instructions and relax sandbox networking

You can now set includeGitInstructions to false (or export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_GIT_INSTRUCTIONS) to remove Claude's built-in commit and PR workflow guidance from the system prompt, freeing up context for your own conventions. Separately, if you use a corporate MITM proxy and tools like gh, gcloud, or terraform fail TLS verification inside the sandbox, sandbox.enableWeakerNetworkIsolation (macOS) lets those programs reach your proxy's certificate chain.

Sonnet 4.5 users auto-migrated to Sonnet 4.6

If you were on Sonnet 4.5 with a Pro, Max, or Team Premium plan, you've been moved to Sonnet 4.6 automatically. The /resume picker also now shows your most recent prompt instead of the first one, which makes it easier to find the session you actually want to continue.

Under the Hood

Memory and rendering improvements across long sessions

Baseline memory drops ~16MB from deferred WASM loading, prompt input re-renders are down ~74%, and several memory leaks in long sessions have been fixed -- including React render scope accumulation (~35MB over 1000 turns) and in-process teammate history that prevented garbage collection after /clear.

Fixes for input freezes, SSH newlines, clipboard corruption, and API errors

Your long-running sessions should no longer freeze on keystroke input, and startup hangs caused by voice mode CoreAudio initialization (5-8 seconds) or simultaneous OAuth refreshes are resolved. If you use SSH, Enter no longer inserts a newline over slow connections. Windows/WSL clipboard now handles CJK and emoji correctly, and API 400 errors with third-party gateways and custom Bedrock inference profiles are fixed.

From Anthropic

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