Anthropic AI Updates: April 28, 2026

1. Anthropic Opens Sydney Office and Names Theo Hourmouzis GM for Australia and New Zealand

Anthropic. Anthropic officially opened its Sydney office and appointed Theo Hourmouzis as General Manager for Australia and New Zealand, the company’s first ANZ leadership hire after rapid commercial growth in the region. The move follows the recent A$25 billion Microsoft Azure expansion and steady enterprise demand for Claude in financial services and government tenants in Australia. Source

2. Claude Code v2.1.121 Lands alwaysLoad MCP Tools, Plugin Pruning, and PostToolUse Output Rewrites

Anthropic. The April 28 Claude Code release adds an alwaysLoad flag for MCP server config so a server’s tools stay available without lazy discovery, and a claude plugin prune command to remove orphaned auto-installed plugin dependencies. PostToolUse hooks can now rewrite tool output for any tool via hookSpecificOutput.updatedToolOutput, and /skills gains a type-to-filter search. The build also adds X.509-based Workload Identity Federation for Vertex AI, deduplication of Vertex connectors with identical upstream URLs, and new OpenTelemetry fields including stop_reason and gen_ai.response.finish_reasons. Source