Claude's 1M Context Window Goes GA: Pricing, Benchmarks, and Practical Use Cases

Anthropic just made their entire 1M token context window generally available on Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 — and they did it without charging a premium. No special pricing tier. No beta header. No asterisks. That's not a typo. A 900,000-token request costs the same per-token rate as a 9,000-token one. If you've been working around context window limits — chunking documents, summarizing intermediate results, losing critical details to compaction — this changes your workflow. Not in a vague "AI is getting better" way. In a "you can now feed your entire codebase into a single prompt" way. This guide breaks down what 1M tokens actually means in practice, why the pricing matters more than the number, where this is genuinely useful (and where it's overkill), and how Claude stacks up against the competition. What 1M Tokens Actually Means Numbers without context are meaningless. Here's what a million tokens translates to in the real world. In pages: Roughly 3,000 pages of standard text. Th