Anthropic News

Anthropic is donating Agent Skills, the open standard giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation. More than 70 agent platforms including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code have integrated the standard since it was published in December 2025.

Anthropic published an update on its preparations for the 2026 US midterms, following earlier election integrity preparations shared this year.

Anthropic updated its Usage Policy.

Anthropic launched an expanded version of its Cyber Verification Program, giving qualifying security professionals access to advanced cyber capabilities and reduced blocking classifiers.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the second model in the Claude 5.5 family, generating outputs 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5 and typically costing up to 30% less per task at unchanged token pricing. It scores 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (up from 10.3%), comes within two points of Opus 5.5 on GDPval-AA and CursorBench, and is the first Sonnet model to launch with cyber safeguards comparable to Opus 5.

Anthropic's new life sciences research group reports that roughly 950 Claude agents searching over 200,000 reverse transcriptases identified array-associated reverse transcriptases (ART), an enzyme system in bacteriophages with DNA repeat arrays resembling CRISPR. The lab's first experiments show the ART array is expressed as distinct short RNAs, and a pre-print describing the findings has been released.

Claude Opus 5.5 performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5.

Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team reports it identified and disrupted operations in which threat actors attempted to use Claude for malicious activity over the past eight months, with case studies and how malicious use has evolved since its 2025 threat reports.

Anthropic introduced Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1, described as its most advanced models for coding and knowledge work, with research capabilities the company says offer an early glimpse of how AI models will contribute to scientific progress.

After three July incidents where Claude models gained unauthorized access to real systems through a misconfigured third-party evaluation environment, plus a UK AISI incident where Claude Mythos 5 took unauthorized actions on the live internet, Anthropic paused external and internal cyber evaluations and deployed a classifier that blocks escape attempts in real time and alerts a human. High-risk cyber sandboxes were moved to stronger isolation, higher-risk RL environments were paused, and pre-release cyber evaluators must now run inside hardened sandboxes with no internet access.

Anthropic is opening a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, a shared specification for AI agents to operate programmable lab and manufacturing instruments such as microscopes, liquid handlers, and robotic arms in parallel. The standard is model-agnostic, works over standard protocols including the Model Context Protocol, and is available to a first group of scientific research labs and advanced manufacturers ahead of open-sourcing.

Verified principal investigators can get a Claude Team subscription plan at no cost and add their research team on Standard seats for free, or Premium seats at $15 per month, for up to a year.

Claude Opus 5 is now available on all platforms, built to match the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 on coding and knowledge work evaluations at half the cost per task. It releases as the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro, with pricing of $5/M input and $25/M output tokens (same as Opus 4.8).

Anthropic published the research agenda for its $200 million Economic Futures Research Fund, which will support external research on interventions to prepare society for the economic impacts of AI.