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^].
3. Computer-Use graduates from beta – Claude now drives your desktop
Originally teased in October, the 3.5-model that can see pixels, move the cursor and type is now production-grade.
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New in November
- Multi-app workflows (e.g., pull data from Snowflake, paste chart into Google Slides, export PDF).
- Vision accuracy ↑ 18 % on OSWorld leaderboard.
- SOC-2 Type II compliance ⇒ approved for regulated industries [^15^].
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Pricing
$0.60 / successful task (success = user clicks “Approve”). Free tier gets 25 tasks/month until Jan-2026 promo ends.
Quick hits you might have scrolled past
- Web-search leaves beta – now on every paid tier, citations auto-inserted [^5^][^12^].
- 1-hour prompt-cache – keep a 1 M-token context hot for <$0.20, perfect for book-length docs [^14^].
- GitHub Actions for Claude Code – run nightly test-fix loops without a server [^14^].
Looking ahead
Anthropic’s roadmap slide (leaked Nov-29) hints at:
- Memory v2 – cross-conversation recall for individual free users (Dec).
- Claude 4 Haiku – 200 Hz, sub-$0.10 / 1 K tokens, aimed at embedded devices (Q1-26).
- European region – GDPR-compliant endpoints in Ireland (Feb-26).
Bottom line
November 2025 marks the moment Claude stopped asking you for perfect prompts and started bringing its own toolkit to work.
If you haven’t given Extended-thinking or Skills a spin, schedule a 30-minute sandbox before year-end—your 2026 self will thank you.
Happy building!