Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Code 2.0, new VS Code Extensions
Anthropic launched a major update with Claude Sonnet 4.5, achieving 77.2% SWE-Bench verified performance and improvements in finance, law, and STEM. They also released Claude Code v2 featuring checkpoints, a refreshed terminal, and a native VS Code extension, plus a new mascot Clawd. The Claude API gained context editing and memory tools, and the Claude Agent SDK was introduced. The Claude.ai apps now support code execution and file creation, with a Chrome extension available for Max users. Additionally, Imagine with Claude offers a generative UI research preview. Reception has been positive from developers and third-party evaluators. Meanwhile, DeepSeek released V3.2-Exp with a new Sparse Attention algorithm, significantly reducing long-context costs and cutting API prices by over 50%, while maintaining quality.