Claude Opus 4.5 is now live and "meaningfully better" at everyday tasks (www.techradar.com)

Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.5, an incremental but practical upgrade to its Claude family that the company says is “meaningfully better” at everyday tasks. The model is already live for Claude Pro and enterprise customers and aims to be faster, more accurate, and cheaper to run than prior versions — with particular gains on real-world workflows like email drafting, document editing, slide-deck formatting, and coding. Anthropic positions Opus 4.5 less as a benchmark challenger and more as a reliability and productivity booster: fewer fixes for messy prompts, steadier multi-step task execution, and improved consistency for routine work. Technically, Opus 4.5 tightens reasoning, handles longer context and denser prompts, and executes chained workflows with lower compute cost. It also improves multimodal outputs (better charts, tables and formatted visuals) and agent-style behavior — invoking external tools and maintaining context across complex instruction sequences more reliably. While not fully multimodal for audio/video, these refinements make the model more useful at scale for both consumers and enterprises. Anthropic cautions the model still has blind spots, but the rapid cadence from 4.0 to 4.5 (and hints of 5.0) signals fast iteration focused on usability, cost-efficiency, and integration — the kinds of gains that can change day-to-day AI adoption more than headline benchmark wins.