Claude AI in November 2025: A Month of “Extreme Reasoning”, Skills & Computer-Use
November 2025 saw Anthropic move the Claude family from “helpful chatbot” to “agentic co-worker”.
Below are the three headline moves you may have missed while you were wrapping up Q4.
1. “Extreme Reasoning” drops – Opus 4 & Sonnet 4 think longer, code better
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What changed
- Claude Opus 4 becomes Anthropic’s flagship coding model, built for multi-hour agent loops.
- Claude Sonnet 4 gets a 2 × speed-up plus higher instruction-fidelity.
- Both models ship in two modes:
- Fast (sub-second)
- Extended-thinking (up to 5 min), letting the model search, test and debug its own outputs.
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Why it matters
Internal benchmarks show a 42 % jump on SWE-bench (real GitHub issues) vs. 3.5-Sonnet, with pass@1 above 70 % when the agent is allowed to iterate.
Early adopters report 7-hour autonomous coding sessions that complete full feature branches without human hand-off [^14^]. -
How to try
- Available today on claude.ai (Max/Team/Enterprise) and the Anthropic API.
- Toggle “Extended thinking” in the UI or set
thinking_budget_tokensin the API.
2. “Skills” GA – turn Claude into your company’s mini-employee
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What it is
Skills are portable folders that bundle instructions, Python/R scripts, brand guidelines, SQL queries—anything Claude needs to repeat a workflow.
Think “Excel macro” meets “GPT”, but version-controlled and shareable across seats. -
Ships with 20 pre-builds
- “Quarterly-earnings parser” (pulls tables from PDFs, writes CEO summary)
- “Canva brand-guard” (auto-crops to template, exports 4 sizes)
- “Jira→Slack sprint digest”
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Who gets it
Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. API & Agent SDK support landed Nov-18 [^3^].