Anthropic just dropped Claude Opus 4.8 today, an incremental but meaningful upgrade over Opus 4.7. Here are the highlights:
Model improvements
- Better performance across coding, agentic, reasoning, and knowledge work benchmarks
- Significantly improved honesty: the model is reportedly ~4x less likely to let flaws in its own code go unremarked compared to Opus 4.7
- Alignment assessment shows lower rates of deceptive or misaligned behavior, on par with their Claude Mythos Preview model
- Scores 84% on Online-Mind2Web for computer use and browser agent tasks, ahead of both Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5
New features launching alongside it
- Dynamic workflows (Claude Code): Claude can now spin up hundreds of parallel subagents in a single session to tackle large-scale problems like full codebase migrations. Available for Enterprise, Team, and Max plans.
- Effort control: Users on claude.ai can now choose how much compute effort Claude puts into a response, from faster/cheaper to deeper/slower.
- API update: The Messages API now accepts system entries inside the messages array, letting developers update instructions mid-task without breaking prompt cache.
Pricing
Same as Opus 4.7: $5/M input tokens, $25/M output tokens. Fast mode (2.5x speed) is now 3x cheaper than it was for previous models, at $10/$50 per million tokens.
What's next
Anthropic mentioned they are working on bringing Mythos-class models (currently in limited preview for cybersecurity use cases under Project Glasswing) to general availability in the coming weeks.
Full details and system card: anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8
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