Anthropic kicked off its first-ever Code with Claude conference today with the announcement of a new frontier AI system. The company is calling Claude Opus 4 the best coding model in the world. According to Anthropic, Opus 4 is dramatically better at tasks that require it to complete thousands of separate steps, giving it the ability to work continuously for several hours in one go. Additionally, the new model can use multiple software tools in parallel, and it’s better at following instructions more precisely.
In combination, Anthropic says those capabilities make Opus 4 ideal for powering upcoming AI agents. For the unfamiliar, agentic systems are AIs that are designed to plan and carry out complicated tasks without human supervision. They represent an important step towards the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI). In customer testing, Anthropic saw Opus 4 work on its own seven hours, or nearly a full workday. That’s an important milestone for the type of agentic systems the company wants to build.
Another reason Anthropic thinks Opus 4 is ready to enable the creation of better AI agents is because the model is 65 percent less likely to use a shortcut or loophole when completing tasks. The company says the system also demonstrates significantly better “memory capabilities,” particularly when developers grant Claude local file access. To encourage devs to try Opus 4, Anthropic is making Claude Code, its AI coding agent, widely available. It has also added new integrations with Visual Studio Code and JetBrains.
Even if you’re not a coder, Anthropic might have something for you. That’s because alongside Opus 4, the company announced a new version of its Sonnet model. Like Claude 3.7 Sonnet before it and Opus 4, the new system is a hybrid reasoning model, meaning it can execute prompts nearly instantaneously and engage in extended thinking. As a user, this gives you a best of both worlds chatbot that’s better equipped to tackle complex problems when needed. It also incorporates many of the same improvements found in Opus 4, including the ability to use tools in parallel and follow instructions more faithfully.
Sonnet 3.7 was so popular among users Anthropic ended up introducing a Max plan in response, which starts at $100 per month. The good news is you won’t need to pay anywhere near that much to use Sonnet 4, as Anthropic is making it available to free users.
For those who want to use Sonnet 4 for a project, API pricing is staying at $3 per one million input tokens and $15 for the same amount of output tokens. Notably, outside of all the usual places you’ll find Anthropic’s models, including Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI, Microsoft is making Sonnet 4 the default model for the new coding agent it’s offering through GitHub Copilot. Both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are available to use today.
Today’s announcement comes during what’s already been a busy week in the AI industry. On Tuesday, Google kicked off its I/O 2025 conference, announcing, among other things, that it was rolling out AI Mode to all Search users in the US. A day later, OpenAI said it was spending $6.5 billion to buy Jony Ive’s hardware startup.
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