Anthropic Removes Long-Context Premium: 1M-Token Window Now GA at Standard Pricing
If you’ve been hesitating to build long-context workflows because of the cost, Anthropic just removed the last excuse. As of March 13, 2026, the full 1 million token context window is generally available for both Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 — at standard API pricing, with no premium multiplier attached. That’s a significant shift. Until now, heavy long-context usage carried an implicit tax: either you paid a premium rate for requests over certain thresholds, or you engineered around the limitation with chunking, compaction, and lossy summarization. Those workarounds aren’t free — they cost engineering time, introduce accuracy loss, and add system complexity. Anthropic is now saying: stop doing that. ...