Shopify CTO Details AI Phase Transition: Unlimited Opus-4.6 Token Budget, Internal Tools Tangle, Tangent, and SimGym

Summary

In a detailed interview on the Latent Space podcast, Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin revealed the scope of Shopify's AI transformation in 2026, describing it as a 'phase transition' in internal AI usage. Parakhin disclosed that Shopify has adopted an unlimited token budget for Anthropic's Opus-4.6 model, signaling massive investment in frontier model consumption across engineering and product workflows. The interview covers multiple internally-built AI systems: Tangle (an agentic workflow orchestra