Anthropic · proprietary on Arena · first on Arena 6 February 2026

claude-opus-4-6-thinking

197 days in first place

It held first place on Arena in Text (143 days), WebDev (35 days) and Vision (19 days).

Embed

Who held first place

<iframe src="https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/embed/" title="Frontier: who held first place on each Arena leaderboard, and for how long" width="100%" height="560" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Credits LMArena.

The open-weights catch-up

<iframe src="https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/embed/catch-up/" title="Frontier: the days until open weights matched each closed leader" width="100%" height="900" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Credits LMArena.

The saturation clock

<iframe src="https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/embed/clock/" title="Frontier: the days from each benchmark’s release to a model at 90%" width="100%" height="640" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Credits Epoch AI.

Each frame links back to its page. Preview it.

Cite

This page

Jesse Hawkins, “claude-opus-4-6-thinking · Frontier”, jesseahawkins.com, data retrieved 30 Oct 2026. https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/claude-opus-4-6-thinking/. Data: LMArena, Arena leaderboard dataset, revision 4491b06, CC BY 4.0; Epoch AI, Capabilities & benchmarking, CC BY 4.0.

BibTeX

@misc{hawkins2026frontierclaudeopus46thinking,
  author = {Hawkins, Jesse},
  title = {{claude-opus-4-6-thinking · Frontier}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/claude-opus-4-6-thinking/}},
  note = {Data: LMArena, Arena leaderboard dataset, revision 4491b06, CC BY 4.0; Epoch AI, Capabilities \& benchmarking, CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-10-30}
}

Arena · LMArena

LMArena, "Arena leaderboard dataset", Hugging Face, revision 4491b06. https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmarena-ai/leaderboard-dataset. CC BY 4.0.

Benchmarks · Epoch AI

Epoch AI, 'Capabilities & benchmarking'. Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved from 'https://epoch.ai/benchmarks' [online resource]. CC BY 4.0.

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Post on X

Text: 143 days in first place

last on the board 11 August 2026

1st10th

On the board: 6 February 2026 to 11 August 2026
Score: 1503 (1499–1506) on 11 August 2026 · 72,425 votes
First place: 6 February 2026 to 19 February 2026 · 13 days
18 March 2026 to 26 July 2026 · 130 days
Catch-up: It left the board on 11 August 2026, 186 days after it first took first place. No open-weights model had matched it.

WebDev: 35 days in first place

last on the board 11 August 2026

1st10th

On the board: 9 February 2026 to 11 August 2026
Score: 1546 (1540–1552) on 11 August 2026 · 16,054 votes
First place: 9 February 2026 to 17 February 2026 · 8 days
4 March 2026 to 16 March 2026 · 12 days
2 April 2026 to 17 April 2026 · 15 days
Catch-up: Open weights matched it on 16 June 2026, 127 days after it first took first place: glm-5.2 (max).

Vision: 19 days in first place

last on the board 6 August 2026

1st10th

On the board: 26 March 2026 to 6 August 2026
Score: 1316 (1309–1323) on 6 August 2026 · 20,310 votes
First place: 10 April 2026 to 19 April 2026 · 9 days
27 April 2026 to 7 May 2026 · 10 days
Catch-up: It left the board on 6 August 2026, 118 days after it first took first place. No open-weights model had matched it.

Epoch AI: Claude Opus 4.6

released 5 February 2026 · API access

Chess Puzzles 21.0%
EBR-bench 12.7%
FrontierMath-2025-02-28-Private 40.7%
FrontierMath-Tier-4-2025-07-01-Private 22.9%
FrontierMath-Tier-4-v2-Private 26.8%
FrontierMath-Tiers-1-3-v2-Private 66.0%
Furniture Assembly 28.3%
GPQA diamond 90.5%
Mystery Game Puzzles 25.0%
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 94.4%
SWE-Bench verified 78.7%
SimpleQA Verified 47.0%

When each vendor retires it

every model’s dates

Anthropic not before 5 Feb 2027 claude-opus-4-6
Azure AI Foundry 2 Feb 2027 claude-opus-4-6 (version 1)

Sources

Arena scores come from people voting between two anonymous answers. First place is the highest score; the top two are often within each other’s margin of error. LMArena, Arena leaderboard dataset, revision 4491b06, retrieved 30 October 2026; Epoch AI, Capabilities & benchmarking, retrieved 30 October 2026. Both CC BY 4.0. Retirement dates: each vendor’s own deprecation page, quoted and kept, listed with the record.