Claude Opus 4.6 marks a structural shift from “AI as Copilot” to autonomous Agent Teams — and with it, a new class of operational risk. As models move from linear workflows to lateral coordination, humans are no longer reviewing outputs — they are trusting conversations they never saw. With 1M-token context windows dropping to 76% retrieval accuracy, adaptive reasoning introducing intelligence variance, and agents directly editing Excel and PowerPoint, the “Trust Tax” has become a liability problem.