Anthropic releases new model, Opus 4.8
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Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 Thursday, an upgrade to its flagship AI model with better coding and knowledge work skills, all for the same price as its prior version.
Why it matters: The new model still lags the performance of Mythos, Anthropic's most advanced, but the company says Mythos-class models are expected "in the coming weeks."
Driving the news: Anthropic said Opus 4.8 outperformed competitors on a number of key benchmarks, including agentic coding, reasoning, financial analysis and knowledge work.
- The model has a fast mode that allows it to work at 2.5x the speed while being three times cheaper than it was for previous models.
- The company is launching other updates alongside the model, including a "dynamic workflow" that lets Claude run multiple subagents at once and a control panel that lets users decide how much "effort" Claude puts into a response.
Zoom in: Opus 4.8 scored well on "prosocial" traits like supporting user autonomy and acting in the user's best interest, achieving a similar level to Mythos, Anthropic's most powerful model, the company said.
- This kind of metric may get more attention after a study on AI agents running simulated towns went viral. It showed Claude's agents were the least likely among the models to commit crime.
Between the lines: Customers are increasingly looking for ways to use AI more affordably.
- This launch from Anthropic emphasizes tools that allow customers to tailor their usage to how much they want to spend.
- High effort settings, for example, will "think" for longer, while lower effort settings provide quicker responses that take up fewer tokens, letting users hit rate limits more slowly.
Yes, but: Opus 4.8 still isn't Mythos.
- The company first released Mythos to just a handful of partners due to security concerns.
- A Mythos-class model should be available to all customers "in the coming weeks" following the development of stronger safeguards, according to Anthropic.
What we're watching: How model updates account for the increased customer focus on price going forward.
