GPT-5 might be the big talking point in AI right now, but Anthropic’s Claude is looking for ways to fight back and compete in the crowded market. The company’s latest trick is to up its prompt length. This feature, exclusively for enterprise customers, is in part looking to bring developers over to its tool. The context window, meaning the amount of text that the model can consider, has been raised to 1 million.
That is, as it sounds, absolutely massive. It translates to roughly 750,000 words. Compared to Claude’s previous limit, it is roughly five times higher and more than double the amount offered by GPT-5 right now. However, this new feature will only be made available through Anthropic’s cloud partners, including Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. This means it is only going to apply to a small number of Anthropic users.
This is an area where Anthropic has seen large amounts of growth in recent years, deploying one of the more successful business-focused AI plans. It has been selling it to partners, including Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, and Anysphere’s Cursor.
However, while it does have a grasp on this market right now, the competition is getting competitive, even with these new longer context windows. Both Grok 4 and GPT-5 claim to have some of the best coding capabilities available in AI tools right now.
With the rollout of GPT-5, OpenAI, which has frequently been the first choice for people, could steal away business. OpenAI has largely been a consumer-focused brand, whereas Anthropic has made a lot of its money on the business side. But Altman has shown interest in this other area, too.
Right now, the advancement in context length does give Anthropic a major advantage.
To keep up with the progression from both Grok and ChatGPT, Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4.1 recently. This brought with it improvements to the coding capabilities of the model.
Right now, the advancement in context length does give Anthropic a major advantage. However, it isn’t an entirely unique feature. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro offers a 2-million context window, and Meta’s Llama 4 Scout goes up to a whopping 10 million.
Standing out in this market is challenging. While the improvement in context windows from Anthropic makes a big difference, it is unlikely to be enough to make a massive difference.
Especially considering some research seems to show that, even with a larger context window at hand, AI can’t usually handle incredibly long prompts. Either way, Anthropic is looking for ways to stay competitive.
