AI Arms Race Heats Up: Anthropic Unleashes Claude Opus 4.6 + Multi-Agent “Agent Teams,” While Perplexity Bets Big on Model Council. The AI world never sleeps—and right now, in early February 2026, it feels like it’s sprinting. Two major labs just dropped features and model upgrades that could meaningfully change how developers, researchers, and power users get work done. Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 4.6 , its most capable model to date, along with an experimental Agent Teams system that enables multiple AI agents to collaborate like a real dev team. Almost simultaneously, Perplexity AI introduced Model Council , a clever ensemble approach that brings together several frontier models in a virtual conference room to debate and refine their answers. These aren’t incremental tweaks. They’re signs that the frontier is shifting from single-model chatbots toward coordinated, multi-agent, multi-model systems that handle complex, real-world tasks with dramatically less human oversight. Le...
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