Antigravity Opus 4.6 is Here: Why Free & Pro Users are Already Running Out of Gas

If you’re an Antigravity user, today felt like Christmas morning, until you actually tried to open your presents.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 has officially dropped for both Free and Pro accounts within the Antigravity IDE. On paper, it’s a monster. We’re talking about the reigning champion of agentic coding, the model that just set a 65.4% record on Terminal-Bench 2.0, and the only model that seems to actually understand a complex directory structure without having a panic attack.

But there’s a massive “but” hanging over this launch.

I’ve been monitoring the Reddit threads all morning, and the sentiment is… polarized, to say the least. While developers are hailing the sheer intelligence of the model, they’re also watching their quotas vanish faster than a developer’s social life during a crunch week. One user reported burning through their entire Pro quota in just 40 minutes of active use.

Look, I’ve seen some aggressive token consumption in my time, but this? This is a different level. It echoes the monetization war we’ve been tracking, where compute is the new currency.

The Technical King: Why We Want This (Badly)

Let’s be direct: Opus 4.6 isn’t just a minor patch. It’s a fundamental upgrade to the agentic experience. While we’ve spent months debating the Cursor vs Antigravity rivalry, Antigravity just played its trump card.

The integration of Opus 4.6 brings:
* 1M Token Context (Beta): Allowing you to feed an entire organization’s worth of documentation into a single session. This is the “1M token beast” we covered in our Opus 4.6 vs GPT-5.2 deep dive.
* Superior Planning: It’s no longer just “predicting the next token.” It’s breaking down tasks into 6-7 step plans across multiple repositories.
* Self-Correction: If it breaks your build, it actually notices. (Which, honestly, is more than I can say for some junior devs I’ve worked with.)

This connects back to what we noted in the Google AI Studio handoff strategy. Google is building a vertical stack where the logic you prototype in Google AI Studio executes with the raw power of Opus 4.6 in Antigravity. It’s a clean flow, if you can afford the gas. It’s similar to the MiniMax Agent approach, but vertically integrated.

The Quota Crisis: “My $50 Credit Lasted One Prompt”

Here’s the thing: IQ comes at a price.

Opus 4.6 is a heavyweight. It thinks deeply, it explores agents, and it uses tools like a pro. But all that “thinking” costs tokens. The community reaction has been intense.

One developer on Reddit claimed they snagged a $50 free credit to test the new model. They gave it one complex, multi-repo task—essentially asking it to refactor a legacy auth flow and write unit tests.

The result? The model spent 20 minutes “planning,” spawned 12 sub-agents, explored three different libraries, and successfully completed the task. It was brilliant. It was beautiful. And it cost exactly $48.50 in compute credits.

He literally had enough change left for a cheap coffee and a very efficient regret.

This isn’t just a funny story; it’s a warning. On a free Antigravity account, Opus 4.6 can use up 100% of your daily quota just planning the task without even starting the code. It’s like buying a Ferrari and realizing you can only afford to drive it to the end of your driveway and back once a day.

Antigravity vs. The World: Where We Stand

How does this launch affect the Monetization War we’ve been tracking?

OpenAI is charging $60 CPM for ads to subsidize their free users. Anthropic is betting that people will pay for “Trust” and “Premium Performance.” By bringing Opus 4.6 to the Antigravity Pro tier (and even testing it on Free), Google and Anthropic are trying to hook developers on a level of intelligence that makes everything else feel like a toy.

But is it sustainable? If the Pro quota only lasts an hour, the “Pro” label starts to feel a bit aspirational.

The Bottom Line

Antigravity with Opus 4.6 is currently the “Final Boss” of AI coding agents. If you have a mission-critical bug that requires deep architectural understanding, this is the model you use. Period.

But for your day-to-day “add a button” tasks? You might want to stick to Gemini 3 Flash or even MiniMax M2.1. Opus 4.6 is a precision instrument, and using it for boilerplate is like using a surgical laser to cut a birthday cake: it’ll work, but it’s an expensive way to get the job done.

Honestly, I’m bullish on the intelligence, but terrified of the bill. We’re entering an era where “coding speed” is no longer the bottleneck—it’s “compute budget.” Choose your prompts wisely.

FAQ

Is Opus 4.6 available on the Antigravity Free tier?

Yes, it is currently being rolled out to Free users, though with very strict rate limits and a lower quota than Pro accounts.

Can I still use Opus 4.5 if I want to save tokens?

Antigravity allows you to switch between models in the settings. For many, Opus 4.5 remains the “sweet spot” of performance vs. credit usage.

How do I increase my Antigravity quota?

Google is currently scaling their paid tiers. Moving to a “Tier 1” or Enterprise account is the only reliable way to get enough “gas” for sustained Opus 4.6 development.

Does Opus 4.6 support the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Yes, Antigravity’s implementation of Opus 4.6 is fully compatible with MCP servers, allowing it to interact with external tools and data sources.