Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, concedes it trails unreleased Mythos
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Photo: Prakash Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.7, a meaningful upgrade to its flagship AI model with better coding, sharper vision and a new ability to double-check its own work.
Why it matters: Anthropic publicly conceded that the new Opus model does not match the performance of Mythos, a highly advanced system that the company hasn't released to the public due to safety concerns.
- In a chart accompanying its announcement, Anthropic showed that Opus 4.7 beats Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.4, Google Gemini 3.1 Pro in a number of key benchmarks.
- But Opus 4.7 still falls short of its Mythos Preview model, which has only been released to a handpicked group of tech and cybersecurity companies.
What they're saying: "Opus 4.7 is a notable improvement on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering, with particular gains on the most difficult tasks," Anthropic said in a blog post.
- "Users report being able to hand off their hardest coding work—the kind that previously needed close supervision—to Opus 4.7 with confidence."
- "The model also has substantially better vision: it can see images in greater resolution," it said. "It's more tasteful and creative when completing professional tasks, producing higher-quality
interfaces, slides, and docs."
The big picture: The release arrives amid weeks of user complaints that Opus 4.6 had quietly gotten worse.
- "Claude has regressed to the point it cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering," an AMD senior director wrote in a widely shared post on GitHub.
- Speculation centered on whether Claude has been deliberately scaled back — what users are calling "nerfed" — either to control costs or to redirect scarce compute toward Mythos and other frontier efforts.
- Anthropic denied that any changes it made were to redirect computing resources to other projects.
Zoom in: In addition to the new model, Anthropic is shifting its default level of reasoning in Claude Code and offering a new option.
- "Opus 4.7 introduces a new xhigh ("extra high") effort level between high and max, giving users finer control over the tradeoff between reasoning and latency on hard problems," Anthropic said."When testing Opus 4.7 for coding and agentic use cases, we recommend starting with high or xhigh effort."
- It's also testing a new system called "task budgets" that give developers more control over how Claude does its reasoning on longer tasks.
Between the lines: Anthropic said it will use the new release to test guardrails designed to prevent its model being used for cybersecurity attacks.
- "What we learn from the real-world deployment of these safeguards will help us work towards our eventual goal of a broad release of Mythos-class models," the company said.
