API Need50% off
Uptime
Total Context
1M
Max Output
128K
Input
$2.5/ 1M
Output
$12.5/ 1M
Cache Read
$0.25/ 1M
Cache Write
$3.125/ 1M
AAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.6 API
anthropic/claude-opus-4.6
Claude Opus 4.6 API is an earlier premium Anthropic release with a 1M context and mixed input support. Its standard benchmark row is much faster than high-effort Opus runs, but sits lower in logic quality. [1]
Claude Opus 4.6 API ranks #23 with a 25.79 median and 65-second measured completion time. Compared with Claude Opus 4.8’s highlighted high-effort run, it is dramatically faster but not a like-for-like reasoning configuration. [1][2]
MODALITIES
Price$2.5 / $12.5 / 1MCONTEXT1M
Playground
Test Claude Opus 4.6 API with representative production prompts before using claude-opus-4.6 in a live workflow.
Providers
APINEED lists Claude Opus 4.6 API with text, image, and file input, text output, and a 1M context window. APINEED routing and prepaid rates are identified separately. [1]
Discount
The model carries the same listed token rates as newer Opus versions. APINEED’s 50% discount lowers cost, but buyers should not expect an older version discount beyond that. The table compares official Claude Opus 4.6 API pricing with the APINEED prepaid rate.
Official
Provider baselineInput $5/ 1MOutput $25/ 1M
BaselineAPINEED50% off
Prepaid creditsInput $2.5/ 1MOutput $12.5/ 1M
Availability
APINEED continuously monitors Claude Opus 4.6 API access and keeps requests on healthy capacity.
System statusLast 90 days
Claude Opus 4.6 API Benchmarks
Its #23 row represents standard mode and should not be directly ranked against xhigh rows without considering reasoning budget. The 65-second measured time is one of its distinguishing results. The complete LLM2014 logic 2026-07 table remains below, with Claude Opus 4.6 API highlighted when a current row exists. [2]
| 1st | GPT-5.5 (xhigh) | 83.80 | 77.46 | 7.57% | 494s | 30,811 | $25.51 | $29.57 |
| 2nd | Kimi-K3 (max) | 82.91 | 74.80 | 9.78% | 1095s | 39,912 | $16.76 | $15.00 |
| 3rd | Claude Opus 4.8 (xhigh) | 82.62 | 66.70 | 19.27% | 791s | 41,833 | $28.86 | $24.64 |
| 4th | GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) | 81.94 | 72.99 | 10.92% | 369s | 17,433 | $14.43 | $29.57 |
| 5th | Claude Opus 5 (xhigh) | 78.38 | 71.88 | 8.29% | 426s | 26,392 | $18.21 | $24.64 |
| 6th | Qwen3.7-Max (xhigh) | 74.56 | 66.95 | 10.21% | 374s | 54,207 | $7.81 | $5.14 |
| 7th | GLM-5.2 (max) | 73.68 | 58.27 | 20.91% | 890s | 45,683 | $5.12 | $4.00 |
| 8th | Gemini 3.1 Pro (high) | 73.36 | 58.46 | 20.31% | 214s | 25,905 | $8.58 | $11.83 |
| 9th | GPT-5.6 Luna (xhigh) | 69.49 | 51.97 | 25.21% | 242s | 38,083 | $6.31 | $5.91 |
| 10th | DeepSeek V4 Pro (max) | 68.00 | 49.97 | 26.51% | 1468s | 60,558 | $1.45 | $0.86 |
| 11th | Grok 4.5 (high) | 67.59 | 56.72 | 16.08% | 451s | 43,372 | $7.18 | $5.91 |
| 12th | Muse Spark 1.1 | 66.18 | 57.23 | 13.52% | 542s | 42,416 | $4.98 | $4.19 |
| 13th | Gemini 3.5 Flash (high) | 65.92 | 60.39 | 8.39% | 188s | 36,372 | $9.03 | $8.87 |
| 14th | Doubao-Seed-2.1-pro (high) | 58.69 | 49.35 | 15.91% | 2003s | 85,059 | $10.21 | $4.29 |
| 15th | Qwen3.7-Plus (high) | 58.50 | 44.09 | 24.63% | 1237s | 57,152 | $1.83 | $1.14 |
| 16th | Gemini 3.6 Flash (high) | 56.87 | 41.74 | 26.6% | 206s | 26,329 | $5.45 | $7.39 |
| 17th | Tencent Hy3 (high) | 54.42 | 44.60 | 18.04% | 1035s | 52,037 | $0.83 | $0.57 |
| 18th | Claude Sonnet 5 (xhigh) | 51.37 | 43.14 | 16.02% | 529s | 44,118 | $12.18 | $9.86 |
| 19th | DeepSeek V4 Flash (max) | 50.62 | 36.24 | 28.41% | 611s | 49,593 | $0.40 | $0.29 |
| 20th | MiniMax-M3 | 49.18 | 40.94 | 16.75% | 985s | 56,467 | $1.90 | $1.20 |
| 21st | Claude Opus 5 | 42.08 | 31.73 | 24.6% | 154s | 10,180 | $7.02 | $24.64 |
| 22nd | Claude Opus 4.6 | 36.88 | 25.79 | 30.07% | 65s | 4,387 | $3.03 | $24.64 |
| 23rd | Doubao-Seed-2.0-lite 0428 (high) | 35.32 | 26.77 | 24.21% | 656s | 26,726 | $0.38 | $0.51 |
| 24th | Gemini 3.5 Flash (minimal) | 33.24 | 22.22 | 33.15% | 44s | 6,189 | $1.54 | $8.87 |
| 25th | Ling-3.0-flash | 32.53 | 20.62 | 36.61% | 688s | 86,204 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 26th | Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite (high) | 30.23 | 22.82 | 24.51% | 188s | 18,297 | $1.26 | $2.46 |
| 27th | GPT-5.5 Instant | 28.87 | 17.66 | 38.83% | 25s | 1,673 | $1.39 | $29.57 |
| 28th | Gemma 4 31B | 27.91 | 22.04 | 21.03% | 770s | 15,050 | $0.17 | $0.39 |
| 29th | MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 26.91 | 13.00 | 51.69% | 478s | 29,443 | $0.71 | $0.86 |
| 30th | Qwen3.7-Plus | 26.19 | 16.23 | 38.03% | 314s | 8,692 | $0.28 | $1.14 |
| 31st | Step-3.7-Flash | 26.18 | 13.74 | 47.52% | 258s | 44,912 | $1.46 | $1.16 |
| 32nd | Qwen3.5-27B | 24.96 | 17.98 | 27.96% | 451s | 26,391 | $0.51 | $0.69 |
| 33rd | Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (high) | 23.78 | 14.30 | 39.87% | 82s | 28,351 | $1.17 | $1.48 |
| 34th | Claude Sonnet 5 | 23.64 | 10.86 | 54.06% | 109s | 5,962 | $1.65 | $9.86 |
| 35th | Qwen3.7-Max | 22.45 | 18.53 | 17.46% | 196s | 6,710 | $0.97 | $5.14 |
| 36th | ERNIE 5.1 | 20.49 | 15.49 | 24.4% | 457s | 24,093 | $1.73 | $2.57 |
| 37th | openPangu-2.0-Flash | 19.83 | 10.76 | 45.74% | 571s | 28,199 | $0.18 | $0.23 |
| 38th | LongCat-2.0 | 19.40 | 9.74 | 49.79% | 395s | 14,886 | $0.48 | $1.14 |
| 39th | DeepSeek V4 Flash | 19.39 | 13.37 | 31.05% | 63s | 5,286 | $0.04 | $0.29 |
| 40th | Mistral Medium 3.5 | 18.44 | 13.87 | 24.78% | 194s | 27,854 | $5.77 | $7.39 |
| 41st | Doubao-Seed-2.1-pro | 17.49 | 9.74 | 44.31% | 305s | 6,009 | $0.72 | $4.29 |
| 42nd | GLM-5.2 | 14.80 | 10.43 | 29.53% | 23s | 953 | $0.11 | $4.00 |
| 43rd | Ling-2.6-1T | 13.05 | 8.39 | 35.71% | 229s | 4,770 | $0.31 | $2.29 |
| 44th | iFLYTEK Spark X2 | 12.39 | 6.21 | 49.88% | 458s | 11,285 | $0.09 | $0.29 |
| 45th | Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite | 11.79 | 10.28 | 12.81% | 9s | 773 | $0.03 | $1.48 |
| 46th | Mistral Medium 3.5 | 10.83 | 7.13 | 34.16% | 17s | 2,546 | $0.53 | $7.39 |
| 47th | Ling-2.6-flash | 10.07 | 4.85 | 51.84% | 25s | 4,997 | $0.04 | $0.30 |
Quick Start
Connect Claude Opus 4.6 API without changing the OpenAI-style request shape. Use Claude Opus 4.6 where prompts are already validated or standard-mode response time matters. Re-run regression suites before moving to a newer Opus release.
Get your API key
Create an APINEED key for Claude Opus 4.6 API and keep it in an environment variable.
export API_NEED_API_KEY=sk-apineed-v1-...Make your first request
Use claude-opus-4.6 for Claude Opus 4.6 API with the APINEED API. The request shape is compatible with OpenAI chat completions, so most SDKs only need a base URL change.
TypeScript SDKPythoncURLOpenAI SDK
import OpenAI from "openai";
const client = new OpenAI({
apiKey: process.env.API_NEED_API_KEY,
baseURL: "https://apineed.com/v1"
});
const result = await client.chat.completions.create({
model: "anthropic/claude-opus-4.6",
messages: [
{ role: "user", content: "Why is the sky blue?" }
]
});
console.log(result.choices[0].message.content);Enable streaming and fallbacks
Add stream: true when Claude Opus 4.6 API should return server-sent events. APINEED keeps routing, provider health, and fallback handling behind the same endpoint.
curl https://apineed.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_NEED_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "anthropic/claude-opus-4.6",
"stream": true,
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }]
}'Claude Opus 4.6 API Endpoint
Claude Opus 4.6 API accepts chat conversations here with streaming or non-streaming text output; the supported controls are listed on this page.
POST
/v1/chat/completions- Authorization
- Bearer $API_NEED_API_KEY
- Content-Type
- application/json
- HTTP-Referer
- optional - your site URL, for rankings
- X-Title
- optional - your site name, for rankings
- Model
- anthropic/claude-opus-4.6
Parameters
Claude Opus 4.6 API parameters currently listed for anthropic/claude-opus-4.6 by the OpenRouter Models API. [1]
| Name | Type | Status | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
include_reasoning | boolean | Supported | Includes reasoning content in the response when available. |
max_completion_tokens | integer | Supported | Limits the combined visible and reasoning output tokens. |
max_tokens | integer | Supported | Limits generated output tokens. |
reasoning | object | Supported | Controls reasoning behavior and token allocation. |
reasoning_effort | enum | Supported | Selects the model reasoning effort. |
response_format | object | Supported | Requests a specific response format. |
stop | string or array | Supported | Stops generation at the supplied sequence. |
structured_outputs | boolean | Supported | Enables schema-constrained structured output. |
temperature | number | Supported | Controls sampling randomness. |
tool_choice | string or object | Supported | Controls which tool the model may call. |
tools | array | Supported | Defines tools available to the model. |
top_k | integer | Supported | Restricts sampling to the highest-probability tokens. |
top_p | number | Supported | Controls nucleus sampling. |
verbosity | enum | Supported | Controls response detail for models that expose verbosity. |
Claude Opus 4.6 API Q&A
Model-specific answers for teams comparing Claude Opus 4.6 API on capability, benchmark evidence, integration, and cost.
What benchmark mode is shown for Claude Opus 4.6 API?
The mapped July 2026 row is a standard, non-thinking run, ranked #23 with a 25.79 median score.
Is Claude Opus 4.6 API less expensive than newer Opus models?
Not in this catalog. Claude Opus 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, and 5 share the same listed token rates.
Why might an application retain Claude Opus 4.6 API?
Existing prompt validation, predictable standard-mode behavior, or regression stability can justify keeping a specific release.
Does it support large multimodal prompts for Claude Opus 4.6?
For Claude Opus 4.6 API, yes. The catalog lists text, image, and file input with a 1M context window.
Which endpoint serves Claude Opus 4.6 API?
Call Claude Opus 4.6 API through https://apineed.com/v1/chat/completions with claude-opus-4.6 as the model value. Existing OpenAI SDK clients usually need only the APINEED base URL and key.
How do I validate Claude Opus 4.6 API before release?
Evaluate Claude Opus 4.6 API on representative prompts, record quality, latency, and token use, then choose reasoning settings and fallbacks from those results.
How to Deploy the Claude Opus 4.6 API on apineed.com
Deploy Claude Opus 4.6 API through APINEED after validating its model-specific trade-offs above. The API key, credit, and endpoint flow stays consistent across the catalog.
Add credits for Claude Opus 4.6 API
Add credits on APINEED before deploying the Claude Opus 4.6 API. Pay-as-you-go billing lets usage start small and scale with production traffic.
Get your API key
Create an APINEED API key for the Claude Opus 4.6 API. The same key can call Claude Opus 4.6 and other AI APIs through apineed.com.
Set the model slug
Use claude-opus-4.6 as the model value when you deploy the Claude Opus 4.6 API. Keep the APINEED base URL at https://apineed.com/v1.
Send a request to Claude Opus 4.6 API
Send chat completions or responses to the Claude Opus 4.6 API from Claude Code, Codex, or any custom agent. The request keeps its OpenAI-compatible shape.