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.