MCP tools remain relevant for deterministic APIs despite ergonomic criticisms, with new web MCP support in Chrome v146 enabling continuous browsing agents. Persistent memory is emerging as a key differentiator for agents, with IBM improving task completion rates and multi-agent memory framed as a computer architecture challenge. Agent UX is evolving towards always-on, cross-device operation, exemplified by Perplexity Computer on iOS and Claude Code session management.

Anthropic released Opus 4.6 1M context as default with no extra long-context API charges, achieving 78.3% on MRCR v2 at 1M tokens. Sparse attention optimizations like IndexCache in DeepSeek Sparse Attention yield significant speedups on large models with minimal code changes.