Anthropic today announced Claude Opus 4.8, with improvements across benchmarks, and is a more effective collaborator.
Opus 4.8 launches alongside several new features. Users on claude.ai now have control over the amount of effort Claude puts into a task. Claude Code has a new “dynamic workflows” feature that allows it to tackle very large-scale problems. And fast mode for Opus 4.8—where the model can work at 2.5× the speed—is now three times cheaper than it was for previous models.
Opus 4.8’s capabilities
One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty, for instance, to avoid making claims that they can’t support. But a general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, confidently claiming to have made progress in their work despite the evidence being thin. Early testers report that Opus 4.8 is more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims. This is borne out in evaluations, which show that Opus 4.8 is around four times less likely than its predecessor to allow flaws in code it has written to pass unremarked.
A detailed alignment assessment on the model before release by Anthropic’s Alignment team, and the company concluded that Opus 4.8 “reaches new highs on our measures of prosocial traits like supporting user autonomy and acting in the user’s best interest.” The assessment also showed Opus 4.8 to have rates of misaligned behavior (such as deception or cooperation with misuse) that are substantially lower than Opus 4.7, and similar to our best-aligned model, Claude Mythos Preview. The full alignment assessment, accompanied by a suite of pre-deployment safety tests, is reported in the Claude Opus 4.8 System Card.
In addition to Claude Opus 4.8, the following updates also were made:
- Dynamic workflows. Available in research preview, this feature allows Claude to take on even bigger tasks in Claude Code. Claude can plan the work and then run hundreds of parallel subagents in a single session (and with Opus 4.8, the agents can run for even longer). It then verifies its outputs before reporting back to the user. For example, Claude Code with Opus 4.8 can now carry out codebase-scale migrations across hundreds of thousands of lines of code from kickoff to merge, with the existing test suite as its bar. You can read more about dynamic workflows—available in Claude Code for Enterprise, Team, and Max plans—in this post.
- Effort control in claude.ai and Cowork. A new control alongside the model selector lets users choose how much effort Claude puts into a response. On higher effort settings, Claude will think more frequently and more deeply to give better responses. On lower effort settings, Claude will respond faster and use up a user’s rate limits more slowly. Users now have this choice—the effort control is available on all plans.
- The Messages API now accepts system entries inside the messages array. Developers can update Claude’s instructions mid-task without breaking the prompt cache or routing the update through a user turn. This can be used in a given harness to update permissions, token budgets, or environment context as an agent runs.
Claude Opus 4.8 is available everywhere today. Pricing for regular usage is unchanged from Opus 4.7: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Pricing for fast mode is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Developers can use claude-opus-4-8 via the Claude API.
