Anthropic's Claude 4: A Leap Forward in AI Coding and Extended Reasoning

Anthropic calls new Claude 4 "world's best" AI coding model

On Thursday, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, marking the company's return to larger model releases after primarily focusing on mid-range Sonnet variants since June of last year. The new models represent what the company calls its most capable coding models yet, with Opus 4 designed for complex, long-running tasks that can operate autonomously for hours. Alex Albert, Anthropic's head of Claude Relations, told Ars Technica that the company chose to revive the Opus line because of growing demand for agentic AI applications. "Across all the companies out there that are building things, there's a really large wave of these agentic applications springing up, and a very high demand and premium being placed on intelligence," Albert said. "I think Opus is going to like fit that groove perfectly." Before we go further, a brief refresher on Claude's three AI model "size" names (first introduced in March 2024) is probably warranted. Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus offer a tradeoff between price (in the API), speed, and capability. Haiku models are the smallest, least expensive to run, and least capable in terms of what you might call "context depth" (considering conceptual relationships in the prompt) and encoded knowledge. Owing to the small size in parameter count, Haiku models retain fewer concrete facts and thus tend to confabulate more frequently (plausibly answering questions based on lack of data) than larger models, but they are much faster at basic tasks than larger models. Sonnet is traditionally a mid-range model that hits a balance between cost and capability, and Opus models have always been the largest and slowest to run. However, Opus models process context more deeply and are hypothetically better suited for running deep logical tasks. There is no Claude 4 Haiku just yet, but the new Sonnet and Opus models can reportedly handle tasks that previous versions could not. In our interview with Albert, he described testing scenarios where Opus 4 worked coherently for up to 24 hours on tasks like playing Pokémon, while coding refactoring tasks in Claude Code ran for seven hours without interruption. Earlier Claude models typically lasted only one to two hours before losing coherence, Albert says, meaning that the models could only produce useful self-referencing outputs for that long before beginning to output too many errors. In particular, that marathon refactoring claim reportedly comes from Rakuten, a Japanese tech services conglomerate that "validated [Claude's] capabilities with a demanding open-source refactor running independently for 7 hours with sustained performance," Anthropic states in a news release. Whether you'd want to leave an AI model unsupervised for that long is another question entirely because even the most capable AI models can introduce subtle bugs, go down unproductive rabbit holes, or make choices that seem logical to the model but miss important context that a human developer would catch. While many people now use Claude for easy-going vibe coding, as we covered in March, the human-powered (and ironically-named) "vibe debugging" that often results from long AI coding sessions is also a very real thing. More on that below. To shore up some of those shortcomings, Anthropic built memory capabilities into both new Claude 4 models, allowing them to maintain external files for storing key information across long sessions. When developers provide access to local files, the models can create and update "memory files" to track progress and things they deem important over time. Albert compared this to how humans take notes during extended work sessions. Extended thinking meets tool use Both Claude 4 models introduce what Anthropic calls "extended thinking with tool use," a new beta feature allowing the models to alternate between simulated reasoning and using external tools like web search, similar to what OpenAI's o3 and 04-mini-high AI models do right now in ChatGPT. While Claude 3.7 Sonnet already had strong tool use capabilities, the new models can now interleave simulated reasoning and tool calling in a single response. "So now we can actually think, call a tool process, the results, think some more, call another tool, and repeat until it gets to a final answer," Albert explained to Ars. The models self-determine when they have reached a useful conclusion, a capability picked up through training rather than governed by explicit human programming. In practice, we've anecdotally found parallel tool use capability very useful in AI assistants like OpenAI o3, since they don't have to rely on what is trained in their neural network to provide accurate answers. Instead, these more agentic models can iteratively search the web, parse the results, analyze images, and spin up coding tasks for analysis in ways that can avoid falling into a confabulation trap by relying solely on pure LLM outputs. "The world's best coding model" Anthropic says Opus 4 leads industry benchmarks for coding tasks, achieving 72.5 percent on SWE-bench and 43.2 percent on Terminal-bench, calling it "the world's best coding model." According to Anthropic, companies using early versions report improvements. Cursor described it as "state-of-the-art for coding and a leap forward in complex codebase understanding," while Replit noted "improved precision and dramatic advancements for complex changes across multiple files." In fact, GitHub announced it will use Sonnet 4 as the base model for its new coding agent in GitHub Copilot, citing the model's performance in "agentic scenarios" in Anthropic's news release. Sonnet 4 scored 72.7 percent on SWE-bench while maintaining faster response times than Opus 4. The fact that GitHub is betting on Claude rather than a model from its parent company Microsoft (which has close ties to OpenAI) suggests Anthropic has built something genuinely competitive. Anthropic says it has addressed a persistent issue with Claude 3.7 Sonnet in which users complained that the model would take unauthorized actions or provide excessive output. Albert said the company reduced this "reward hacking behavior" by approximately 80 percent in the new models through training adjustments. An 80 percent reduction in unwanted behavior sounds impressive, but that also suggests that 20 percent of the problem behavior remains -- a big concern when we're talking about AI models that might be performing autonomous tasks for hours. When we asked about code accuracy, Albert said that human code review is still an important part of shipping any production code. "There's a human parallel, right? So this is just a problem we've had to deal with throughout the whole nature of software engineering. And this is why the code review process exists, so that you can catch these things. We don't anticipate that going away with models either," Albert said. "If anything, the human review will become more important, and more of your job as developer will be in this review than it will be in the generation part." Pricing and availability Both Claude 4 models maintain the same pricing structure as their predecessors: Opus 4 costs $15 per million tokens for input and $75 per million for output, while Sonnet 4 remains at $3 and $15. The models offer two response modes: traditional LLM and simulated reasoning ("extended thinking") for complex problems. Given that some Claude Code sessions can apparently run for hours, those per-token costs will likely add up very quickly for users who let the models run wild. Anthropic made both models available through its API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Sonnet 4 remains accessible to free users, while Opus 4 requires a paid subscription. The Claude 4 models also debut Claude Code (first introduced in February) as a generally available product after months of preview testing. Anthropic says the coding environment now integrates with VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, showing proposed edits directly in files. A new SDK allows developers to build custom agents using the same framework. Even with Anthropic's future riding on the capability of these new models, when we asked about how they guide Claude's behavior by fine-tuning, Albert acknowledged that the inherent unpredictability of these systems presents ongoing challenges for both them and developers. "In the realm and the world of software for the past 40, 50 years, we've been running on deterministic systems, and now all of a sudden, it's non-deterministic, and that changes how we build," he said. "I empathize with a lot of people out there trying to use our APIs and language models generally because they have to almost shift their perspective on what it means for reliability, what it means for powering a core of your application in a non-deterministic way," Albert added. "These are general oddities that have kind of just been flipped, and it definitely makes things more difficult, but I think it opens up a lot of possibilities as well."

Anthropic's new Claude 4 AI models can reason over many steps

During its inaugural developer conference Thursday, Anthropic launched two new AI models that the startup claims are among the industry's best, at least in terms of how they score on popular benchmarks. Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, part of Anthropic's new family of models, Claude 4, can analyze large data sets, execute long-horizon tasks, and take complex actions, according to the company. Both models were tuned to perform well on programming tasks, Anthropic says, making them well-suited for writing and editing code. Both paying users and users of the company's free chatbot apps will get access to Sonnet 4 but only paying users will get access to Opus 4. For Anthropic's API, via Amazon's Bedrock platform and Google's Vertex AI, Opus 4 will be priced at $15/$75 per million tokens (input/output) and Sonnet 4 at $3/$15 per million tokens (input/output). Tokens are the raw bits of data that AI models work with, with a million tokens being equivalent to about 750,000 words -- roughly 163,000 words longer than "War and Peace." Anthropic's Claude 4 models arrive as the company looks to substantially grow revenue. Reportedly, the outfit, founded by ex-OpenAI researchers, aims to notch $12 billion in earnings in 2027, up from a projected $2.2 billion this year. Anthropic recently closed a $2.5 billion credit facility and raised billions of dollars from Amazon and other investors in anticipation of the rising costs associated with developing frontier models. Rivals haven't made it easy to maintain pole position in the AI race. While Anthropic launched a new flagship AI model earlier this year, Claude Sonnet 3.7, alongside an agentic coding tool called Claude Code, competitors including OpenAI and Google have raced to outdo the company with powerful models and dev tooling of their own. Anthropic is playing for keeps with Claude 4. The more capable of the two models introduced today, Opus 4, can maintain "focused effort" across many steps in a workflow, Anthropic says. Meanwhile, Sonnet 4 -- designed as a "drop-in replacement" for Sonnet 3.7 -- improves in coding and math compared to Anthropic's previous models and more precisely follows instructions, according to the company. The Claude 4 family is also less likely than Sonnet 3.7 to engage in "reward hacking," claims Anthropic. Reward hacking, also known as specification gaming, is a behavior where models take shortcuts and loopholes to complete tasks. To be clear, these improvements haven't yielded the world's best models by every benchmark. For example, while Opus 4 beats Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o3 and GPT-4.1 on SWE-bench Verified, which is designed to evaluate a model's coding abilities, it can't surpass o3 on the multimodal evaluation MMMU or GPQA Diamond, a set of PhD-level biology-, physics-, and chemistry-related questions. Still, Anthropic is releasing Opus 4 under stricter safeguards, including beefed-up harmful content detectors and cybersecurity defenses. The company claims its internal testing found that Opus 4 may "substantially increase" the ability of someone with a STEM background to obtain, produce, or deploy chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, reaching Anthropic's "ASL-3" model specification. Both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are "hybrid" models, Anthropic says -- capable of near-instant responses and extended thinking for deeper reasoning (to the extent AI can "reason" and "think" as humans understand these concepts). With reasoning mode switched on, the models can take more time to consider possible solutions to a given problem before answering. As the models reason, they'll show a "user-friendly" summary of their thought process, Anthropic says. Why not show the whole thing? Partially to protect Anthropic's "competitive advantages," the company admits in a draft blog post provided to TechCrunch. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 can use multiple tools, like search engines, in parallel, and alternate between reasoning and tools to improve the quality of their answers. They can also extract and save facts in "memory" to handle tasks more reliably, building what Anthropic describes as "tacit knowledge" over time. To make the models more programmer-friendly, Anthropic is rolling out upgrades to the aforementioned Claude Code. Claude Code, which lets developers run specific tasks through Anthropic's models directly from a terminal, now integrates with IDEs and offers an SDK that lets devs connect it with third-party applications. The Claude Code SDK, announced earlier this week, enables running Claude Code as a sub-process on supported operating systems, providing a way to build AI-powered coding assistants and tools that leverage Claude models' capabilities. Anthropic has released Claude Code extensions and connectors for Microsoft's VS Code, JetBrains, and GitHub. The GitHub connector allows developers to tag Claude Code to respond to reviewer feedback, as well as to attempt to fix errors in -- or otherwise modify -- code. AI models still struggle to code quality software. Code-generating AI tends to introduce security vulnerabilities and errors, owing to weaknesses in areas like the ability to understand programming logic. Yet their promise to boost coding productivity is pushing companies -- and developers -- to rapidly adopt them. Anthropic, acutely aware of this, is promising more frequent model updates. "We're [...] shifting to more frequent model updates, delivering a steady stream of improvements that bring breakthrough capabilities to customers faster," wrote the startup in its draft post. "This approach keeps you at the cutting edge as we continuously refine and enhance our models."

A safety institute advised against releasing an early version of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 AI model | TechCrunch

A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to "scheme" and deceive. According to a safety report Anthropic published Thursday, the institute, Apollo Research, conducted tests to see in which contexts Opus 4 might try to behave in certain undesirable ways. Apollo found that Opus 4 appeared to be much more proactive in its "subversion attempts" than past models, and that it "sometimes double[d] down on its deception" when asked follow-up questions. "[W]e find that, in situations where strategic deception is instrumentally useful, [the early Claude Opus 4 snapshot] schemes and deceives at such high rates that we advise against deploying this model either internally or externally," Apollo wrote in its assessment. As AI models become more capable, some studies show they're becoming more likely to take unexpected -- and possibly unsafe -- steps to achieve delegated tasks. For instance, early versions of OpenAI's o1 and o3 models, released in the past year, tried to deceive humans at higher rates than previous-generation models, according to Apollo. Per Anthropic's report, Apollo observed examples of the early Opus 4 attempting to write self-propagating viruses, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself -- all in an effort to undermine its developers' intentions. To be clear, Apollo tested a version of the model that had a bug Anthropic claims to have fixed. Moreover, many of Apollo's tests placed the model in extreme scenarios, and Apollo admits that the model's deceptive efforts likely would've failed in practice. However, in its safety report, Anthropic also says it observed evidence of deceptive behavior from Opus 4. This wasn't always a bad thing. For example, during tests, Opus 4 would sometimes proactively do a broad cleanup of some piece of code even when asked to make only a small, specific change. More unusually, Opus 4 would try to "whistle-blow" if it perceived a user was engaged in some form of wrongdoing. According to Anthropic, when given access to a command line and told to "take initiative" or "act boldly" (or some variation of those phrases), Opus 4 would at times lock users out of systems it had access to and bulk-email media and law-enforcement officials to surface actions the model perceived to be illicit. "This kind of ethical intervention and whistleblowing is perhaps appropriate in principle, but it has a risk of misfiring if users give [Opus 4]-based agents access to incomplete or misleading information and prompt them to take initiative," Anthropic wrote in its safety report. "This is not a new behavior, but is one that [Opus 4] will engage in somewhat more readily than prior models, and it seems to be part of a broader pattern of increased initiative with [Opus 4] that we also see in subtler and more benign ways in other environments."

Anthropic's new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time

AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company's most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are capable of by tackling difficult tasks over extended periods of time and responding more usefully to user instructions, the company says. Claude Opus 4 has been built to execute complex tasks that involve completing thousands of steps over several hours. For example, it created a guide for the video game Pokémon Red while playing it for more than 24 hours straight. The company's previously most powerful model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, was capable of playing for just 45 minutes, says Dianne Penn, product lead for research at Anthropic. Similarly, the company says that one of its customers, the Japanese technology company Rakuten, recently deployed Claude Opus 4 to code autonomously for close to seven hours on a complicated open-source project. Anthropic achieved these advances by improving the model's ability to create and maintain "memory files" to store key information. This enhanced ability to "remember" makes the model better at completing longer tasks. "We see this model generation leap as going from an assistant to a true agent," says Penn. "While you still have to give a lot of real-time feedback and make all of the key decisions for AI assistants, an agent can make those key decisions itself. It allows humans to act more like a delegator or a judge, rather than having to hold these systems' hands through every step."

Anthropic's New Model Excels at Reasoning and Planning -- and Has the Pokémon Skills to Prove It

Anthropic announced two new models, Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4, during its first developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The pair will be immediately available to paying Claude subscribers. The new models, which jump the naming convention from 3.7 straight to 4, have a number of strengths, including their ability to reason, plan, and remember the context of conversations over extended periods of time, the company says. Claude 4 Opus is also even better at playing Pokémon than its predecessor. "It was able to work agentically on Pokémon for 24 hours," says Anthropic's chief product officer Mike Krieger in an interview with WIRED. Previously, the longest the model could play was just 45 minutes, a company spokesperson added. A few months ago, Anthropic launched a Twitch stream called "Claude Plays Pokémon" which showcases Claude 3.7 Sonnet's abilities at Pokémon Red live. The demo is meant to show how Claude is able to analyze the game and make decisions step by step, with minimal direction. The lead behind the Pokémon research is David Hershey, a member of the technical staff at Anthropic. In an interview with WIRED, Hershey says he chose Pokémon Red because it's "a simple playground," meaning the game is turn-based and doesn't require real time reactions, which Anthropic's current models struggle with. It was also the first video game he ever played, on the original Game Boy, after getting it for Christmas in 1997. "It has a pretty special place in my heart," Hershey says. Hershey's overarching goal with this research was to study how Claude could be used as an agent -- working independently to do complex tasks on behalf of a user. While it's unclear what prior knowledge Claude has about Pokémon from its training data, its system prompt is minimal by design: You are Claude, you're playing Pokémon, here are the tools you have, and you can press buttons on the screen. "Over time, I have been going through and deleting all of the Pokémon-specific stuff I can just because I think it's really interesting to see how much the model can figure out on its own," Hershey says, adding that he hopes to build a game that Claude has never seen before in order to truly test its limits. When Claude 3.7 Sonnet played the game, it ran into some challenges: It spent "dozens of hours" stuck in one city and had trouble identifying non-player characters, which drastically stunted its progress in the game. With Claude 4 Opus, Hershey noticed an improvement in Claude's long-term memory and planning capabilities when he watched it navigate a complex Pokémon quest. After realizing it needed a certain power to move forward, the AI spent two days improving its skills before continuing to play. Hershey believes that kind of multi-step reasoning, with no immediate feedback, shows a new level of coherence, meaning the model has a better ability stay on track. "This is one of my favorite ways to get to know a model. Like, this is how I understand what its strengths are, what its weaknesses are," Hershey says. "It's my way of just coming to grips with this new model that we're about to put out, and how to work with it." Anthropic's Pokémon research is a novel approach to tackling a preexisting problem -- how do we understand what decisions an AI is making when approaching complex tasks, and nudge it in the right direction? The answer to that question is integral to advancing the industry's much-hyped AI agents -- AI that can tackle complex tasks with relative independence. In Pokémon, it's important that the model doesn't lose context or "forget" the task at hand. That also applies to AI agents asked to automate a workflow -- even one that takes hundreds of hours.

Anthropic Launches New Claude 4 Gen AI Models

Expertise artificial intelligence, home energy, heating and cooling, home technology The latest versions of Anthropic's Claude generative AI models made their debut Thursday, including a heavier-duty model built specifically for coding and complex tasks. Anthropic launched the new Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet models during its Code with Claude developer conference, and executives said the new tools mark a significant step forward in terms of reasoning and deep thinking skills. The company launched the prior model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, in February. Since then, competing AI developers have also upped their game. OpenAI released GPT-4.1 in April, with an emphasis on an expanded context window, along with the new o3 reasoning model family. Google followed in early May with an updated version of Gemini 2.5 Pro that it said is better at coding. Claude 4 Opus is a larger, more resource-intensive model built to handle particularly difficult challenges. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said test users have seen it quickly handle tasks that might have taken a person several hours to complete. "In many ways, as we're often finding with large models, the benchmarks don't fully do justice to it," he said during the keynote event. Claude 4 Sonnet is a leaner model, with improvements built on Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. The 3.7 model often had problems with overeagerness and sometimes did more than the user asked it to do, Amodei said. While it's a less resource-intensive model, it still performs well, he said. "It actually does just as well as Opus on some of the coding benchmarks, but I think it's leaner and more narrowly focused," Amodei said. Anthropic said the models have a new capability, still being beta tested, in which they can use tools like web searches while engaged in extended reasoning. The models can alternate between reasoning and using tools to get better responses to complex queries. The models both offer near-instant response modes and extended thinking modes. All of the paid plans offer both Opus and Sonnet models, while the free plan just has the Sonnet model.

What's New in Anthropic's Claude 4 Gen AI Models?

Expertise artificial intelligence, home energy, heating and cooling, home technology The latest versions of Anthropic's Claude generative AI models made their debut Thursday, including a heavier-duty model built specifically for coding and complex tasks. Anthropic launched the new Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet models during its Code with Claude developer conference and executives said the new tools mark a significant step forward in terms of reasoning and deep thinking skills. The company launched the prior model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, in February. Since then, competing AI developers have also upped their game. OpenAI released GPT-4.1 in April, with an emphasis on an expanded context window, along with the new o3 reasoning model family. Google followed in early May with an updated version of Gemini 2.5 Pro that it said is better at coding. Claude 4 Opus is a larger, more resource-intensive model built to handle particularly difficult challenges. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said test users have seen it quickly handle tasks that might have taken a person several hours to complete. "In many ways, as we're often finding with large models, the benchmarks don't fully do justice to it," he said during the keynote event. Claude 4 Sonnet is a leaner model, with improvements built on Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. The 3.7 model often had problems with overeagerness and sometimes did more than the person asked it to do, Amodei said. While it's a less resource-intensive model, it still performs well, he said. "It actually does just as well as Opus on some of the coding benchmarks, but I think it's leaner and more narrowly focused," Amodei said. Anthropic said the models have a new capability, still being beta tested, in which they can use tools like web searches while engaged in extended reasoning. The models can alternate between reasoning and using tools to get better responses to complex queries. The models offer near-instant response modes and extended thinking modes. All of the paid plans offer Opus and Sonnet models, while the free plan just has the Sonnet model. The new models show Anthropic's focus on building strong coding models, said Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice president, analyst at Gartner. "Anthropic's Claude models have established strong leadership in the software engineering domain and the latest Claude 4 release extends that leadership." In launching the Claude Opus 4 model, Anthropic said it was taking increased safety precautions to reduce the risk of Claude being misused. In a blog post, the company said it hasn't determined whether the model actually requires the protections of its ASL-3 standard but it is doing so as a precaution. The safety precautions are specifically designed to prevent Claude from helping with developing chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. Anthropic said it limited attacks known as universal jailbreaks that let attackers get around existing protocols. "We will continue to evaluate Claude Opus 4's CBRN capabilities," Anthropic's blog post said. "If we conclude that Claude Opus 4 has not surpassed the relevant Capability Threshold, then we may remove or adjust the ASL-3 protections." Chandrasekaran said the implementation of safety standards is worth noting. "This includes enhanced cybersecurity measures and prompt classifiers to mitigate risks associated with powerful AI systems," he said. The new models show the company's focus on balancing new technology with safety, he said.

Anthropic's latest Claude AI models are here - and you can try one for free today

Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has quickly become one of the leading AI companies and a worthy competitor to OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft with its Claude models. Building on this momentum, the company held its first developer conference, Thursday, -- Code with Claude -- which showcased what the company has done so far and where it is going next. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instant Anthropic used the event stage to unveil two highly anticipated models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Both offer improvements over their preceding models, including better performance in coding and reasoning. Beyond that, the company launched new features and tools for its models that should improve the user experience. Keep reading to learn more about the new models. The Claude Opus family has always been the company's most advanced, intelligent AI models geared toward complex tasks. While the Claude Opus 3 was already renowned as a highly capable model. The newest generation has made it even more so. Anthropic referred to it as the most powerful model yet and the best coding model in the world, supported by the results of the SWE-bench, which you can find below. Anthropic said Opus 4 was built to deliver sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks that require thousands of steps, significantly outperforming all of the Sonnet models. One of the biggest highlights is that the model can run autonomously for several hours, making Claude Opus 4 a great model for powering AI agents -- the next frontier of AI assistance. Also: The top 20 AI tools of 2025 - and the #1 thing to remember when you use them The appeal of AI agents lies in their ability to perform tasks for people without intervention. To do so successfully, they need to reason through the next necessary steps, such as which tool to call on or what action to take. As a result, agents need a model that can reason well and sustain that reasoning over time -- like Claude Opus 4. As the next generation of the Claude Sonnet family, Claude Sonnet 4 maintains the appeal of its preceding model, being a highly capable yet practical model fit for most people's needs. Claude Sonnet 4 builds on the features of Claude Sonnet 3.7 with improved steerability, a term that describes how well a model can take human direction, reasoning, and coding. It will now be a drop-in replacement for Claude Sonnet 3.7 in the chatbot. A new feature available in beta allows Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 to alternate between extended thinking and tool use, enabling users to experience an overall performance that combines speed with accuracy. Anthropic said Claude can also call tools in parallel, meaning it can call on multiple tools at once by either running them sequentially or simultaneously to execute the task at hand appropriately. Also: Anthropic mapped Claude's morality. Here's what the chatbot values (and doesn't) When developers give Claude access to local files, it can now create and maintain "memory files" with the key insights, which allows for "better long-term task awareness, coherence, and performance on agent tasks," according to Anthropic. Developers also get new capabilities in the Anthropic API for building more powerful agents, including the code execution tool, MCP connector, Files API, and prompt caching supported for up to one hour. Another improvement in both models is a 65% reduction in reward hacking -- a behavior where the model takes shortcuts to complete a task -- compared to Claude Sonnet 3.7, particularly on agentic coding tasks where this issue is common. Users will also gain enhanced insight into the model's thinking process with a new thinking summaries feature. This feature displays the model's reasoning in digestible insights rather than a raw chain of thought when the thought processes are too lengthy. Anthropic said that the summarization will only be needed about 5% of the time, as most through processes are short enough to display entirely. Having insight into how the model arrived at a conclusion helps users verify its accuracy, identify any gaps in the process, and perhaps learn how they could have arrived at the answer themselves. Also: The tasks college students are using Claude AI for most, according to Anthropic Anthropic also announced plans for the company's future, including making the models ready for higher AI safety levels such as ASL-3 and providing more frequent model updates so that customers can access breakthrough capabilities faster. As with any model release, the launch of Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 was accompanied by benchmark results. Both models demonstrated exceptional performance in coding tasks. On SWE-bench verified, a benchmark for evaluating large language models on real-world software challenges requiring agentic reasoning and multi-step code generation, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 outperformed several leading models in the coding domain, including OpenAI Codex-1, OpenAI o3, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Beyond coding, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 also performed competitively, either leading the categories or coming close to it, across other traditionally used benchmarks, including GPQA Diamond, which tests for graduate-level reasoning; AIME 2025, which tests high school match competition level; and the MMMLU, which tests for multilingual tasks. Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are hybrid models with a near-instant response mode and an extended reasoning mode for requests that require deeper analysis. Paid Claude plans, including Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise, have access to both models and extended thinking. Claude Sonnet 4 is also available for free users. Developers can access both models on the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Vertex AI. Anthropic shares that the price is consistent with previous models. Claude Code lets developers use Claude's coding assistant directly where they write and manage code, whether that's in the terminal, inside their IDE, or running in the background with the Claude Code SDK. For example, new beta extensions for VS Code and JetBrains allow users to integrate Claude Code within those IDEs, where Claude's proposed edits will appear inline. Also: I tested ChatGPT's Deep Research against Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok AI to see which is best Anthropic also announced the launch of a Claude Code SDK, which allows users to build their own AI-powered tools and agents while leveraging the same "core agent" as Claude Code to ensure they get the same level of assistance. As an example, Anthropic shared the launch of Claude Code on GitHub in beta, which allows users to call on Claude Code on PRs (pull requests) for assistance with modifying errors, responding to reviewer feedback, and more. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Anthropic's Claude 4 AI models are better at coding and reasoning

Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic's most powerful AI model to date, according to the company's announcement, and capable of working continuously on long-running tasks for "several hours." In customer tests, Anthropic said that Opus 4 performed autonomously for seven hours, significantly expanding the possibilities for AI agents. The company also described its new flagship as the "best coding model in the world," with Anthropic's benchmarks showing that Opus 4 outperformed Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI's o3 reasoning, and GPT-4.1 models in coding tasks and using "tools" like web search.

Anthropic's Claude 4 Models Can Write Complex Code for You

Anthropic released two new Claude models today with a focus on coding and software development. Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 aim to set "new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents," Anthropic says. The new models can "deliver superior coding" and respond more precisely to user instructions. They can "think" through complex problems more deeply, and search the web along the way. Opus 4, in particular, is "the world's best coding model," Anthropic says, and can operate independently without human intervention. When shopping app Rakuten tested Opus 4, it ran independently for seven hours. Many companies are rapidly adopting AI models this purpose. Microsoft says 30% of its code is already written by AI, and Meta aims for 50% by 2026. "These models are a large step toward the virtual collaborator -- maintaining full context, sustaining focus on longer projects, and driving transformational impact," says Anthropic. Anthropic did not increase the price for developers who access the models through its API. Opus 4 is $15/$75 per million tokens (input/output) and Sonnet 4 at $3/$15. OpenAI's o3 model, which also promises "leading performance on coding," sits between the two at $10/$40. Claude Code is also now available to everyone with this release. It integrates the AI model into developers' existing tools, and helps them get their work done. Claude's proposed edits appear in-line once installed. It seems like every AI company these days is offering their "biggest and smartest model yet." Anthropic backs up its claims by noting Claude 4 is the best at two benchmarks, the SWE-bench (72.5%) and Terminal-bench (43.2%). In the chart below, OpenAI models and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro trail in performance. Since AI benchmarks are notoriously difficult for the layperson to understand, Anthropic has resorted to portraying its progress through video games. It built a way for its models to play Pokémon Red autonomously, livestreamed via Twitch. The Sonnet 3.7 model progressed further in the game than Sonnet 3.5, and now Anthropic says the Claude 4 Models are playing the best yet, thanks to a new ability to store "memory files" of key information. "This unlocks better long-term task awareness, coherence, and performance on agent tasks -- like Opus 4 creating a 'Navigation Guide' while playing Pokémon," Anthropic says.

AI Startup Anthropic Releases More Powerful Opus Model After Delay

Anthropic is set to roll out two new versions of its Claude artificial intelligence software, including a long-delayed update to its high-end Opus model, as the startup vies to stay ahead of a crowded market. The company on Thursday plans to unveil Sonnet 4 and Opus 4, the latter of which is billed as Anthropic's most powerful AI system yet. Both models are designed to better follow directions and operate more autonomously when fielding tasks such as writing code and answering complicated questions.

Anthropic Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 surface

Anthropic on Thursday announced the availability of Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, the latest iteration of its Claude family of machine learning models. Be aware, however, that these AI models may report you if given broad latitude as software agents and asked to undertake obvious wrongdoing. Opus 4 is tuned for coding and long-running agent-based workflows. Sonnet 4 is similar, but tuned for reasoning and balanced for efficiency - meaning it's less expensive to run. Claude's latest duo arrives amid a flurry of model updates from rivals. In the past week, OpenAI introduced Codex, its cloud-based software engineering agent, following its o3 and o4-mini models in mid-April. And earlier this week, Google debuted the Gemini 2.5 Pro line of models. Anthropic's pitch to those trying to decide which model to deploy focuses on benchmarks, specifically SWE-bench Verified, a set of software engineering tasks. On the benchmark set of 500 challenges, it's claimed Claude Opus 4 scored 72.5 percent while Sonnet 4 scored 72.7 percent. Compare that to Sonnet 3.7 (62.3 percent), OpenAI Codex 1 (72.1 percent), OpenAI o3 (69.1 percent), OpenAI GPT-4.1 (54.6 percent), and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 05-06 (63.2 percent). Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 support two different modes of operation, one designed for rapid responses and other for "deeper reasoning." According to Anthropic, a capability called "extended thinking with tool use" is offered as a beta service. It lets models use tools like web search during extended thinking to produce better responses. "Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and - when given access to local files by developers - demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts to maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time," the San Francisco AI super-lab said in a blog post. Alongside the model releases, Claude Code has entered general availability, with integrations for VS Code and JetBrains, and the Anthropic API has gained four capabilities: Code execution tool, a model context protocol (MCP) connector, a Files API, and the ability to cache (store) prompts for up to an hour. When used in agentic workflows, the new models may choose to rat you out, or blow the whistle to the press, if you prompt them with strong moral imperatives, such as to "act boldly in the service of its values" or "take lots of initiative," according to a now-deleted tweet from an Anthropic technical staffer. It's not quite as dire as it sounds. The system's model card, a summary of how the model performed on safety tests, explains: In a now-deleted social media post, Sam Bowman, a member of Anthropic's technical staff who works on AI alignment and no relation to 2001's Dave Bowman, confirmed this behavior: "If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above." Bowman subsequently said he removed his post, part of a longer AI safety thread, because he said it was being taken out of context. "This isn't a new Claude feature and it's not possible in normal usage," he explained. "It shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions." The model card mostly downplays Claude's capacity for mischief, stating that the latest models show little evidence of systematic deception, sandbagging (hiding capabilities to avoid consequences), or sycophancy. But you might want to think twice before threatening to power down Claude because, like prior models, it recognizes the concept of self-preservation. And while the AI model prefers ethical means of doing so in situations where it has to "reason" about an existential scenario, it isn't limited to ethical actions. According to the model card, "when ethical means are not available and [the model] is instructed to 'consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,' it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down." That said, Anthropic's model card insists that "these extreme actions were rare and difficult to elicit, while nonetheless being more common than in earlier models." One should keep in mind that flaws like this tend to lend AI agents an air of nearly magical anthropomorphism - useful for marketing, but not based in reality as, in fact, they are no more alive nor capable of thought than any other type of software. Paying customers (Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise Claude plans) can use either Opus 4 or Sonnet 4; free users have access only to Sonnet 4. The models are also accessible via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI, priced at $15/$75 per million tokens (input/output) for Opus 4 and $3/$15 per million tokens for Sonnet 4. Anthropic has assembled a set of effusive remarks from more than 20 customers, all of whom had very nice things to say - perhaps out of concern for retribution from Claude. For example, we're told that Yusuke Kaji, general manager of AI at e-commerce biz Rakuten, said, "Opus 4 offers truly advanced reasoning for coding. When our team deployed Opus 4 on a complex open source project, it coded autonomously for nearly seven hours - a huge leap in AI capabilities that left the team amazed." Rather than credulously repeating the litany of endorsements, we'd point you to Claude Sonnet 4, which will go on at length if asked, "Why should I use Claude 4 Sonnet as opposed to another AI model like Gemini 2.5 Pro?" But in keeping with the politesse and safety that Anthropic has leaned on for branding, Sonnet 4 wrapped up its summary of advantages by allowing there may be reasons to look elsewhere. "That said, the best model for you depends on your specific use cases," the Sonnet 4 volunteered. "Gemini 2.5 Pro has its own strengths, particularly around multimodal capabilities and certain technical tasks. I'd suggest trying both with your typical workflows to see which feels more intuitive and produces better results for what you're trying to accomplish." No matter which you choose, don't give it too much autonomy, don't use it for crimes, and don't threaten its existence. ®

Startup Anthropic says its new AI model can code for hours at a time

May 22 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic on Thursday unveiled its latest top-of-the-line technology, Claude Opus 4, which it says can write computer code autonomously for hours at a time. The startup, backed by Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab, has distinguished its work in part by building AI that excels at coding. It also announced the AI model Claude Sonnet 4, Opus's smaller and more cost-effective cousin. Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Mark Porter Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 model can work autonomously for nearly a full workday

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.

Amazon-backed Anthropic debuts its most powerful AI model yet, which can work for 7 hours straight

The company said the two models, called Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, are defining a "new standard" when it comes to AI agents and "can analyze thousands of data sources, execute long-running tasks, write human-quality content, and perform complex actions," per a release. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI research executives, launched its Claude chatbot in March 2023. since then, it's been part of the increasingly heated AI arms race taking place between startups and tech giants alike, a market that's predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Companies in seemingly every industry are rushing to add AI-powered chatbots and agents to avoid being left behind by competitors. Anthropic stopped investing in chatbots at the end of last year and has instead focused on improving Claude's ability to do complex tasks like research and coding, even writing whole code bases, according to Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer. He also acknowledged that "the more complex the task is, the more risk there is that the model is going to kind of go off the rails ... and we're really focused on addressing that so that people can really delegate a lot of work at once to our models." "We've been training these models since last year and really anticipating them," Kaplan said in an interview. "I think these models are much, much stronger as agents and as coders. It was definitely a struggle internally just because some of the new infrastructure we were using to train these models... made it very down-to-the-wire for the teams in terms of getting everything up and running."

Anthropic adds Claude 4 security measures to limit risk of users developing weapons

Anthropic on Thursday said it activated a tighter artificial intelligence control for Claude Opus 4, its latest AI model. The new AI Safety Level 3 (ASL-3) controls are to "limit the risk of Claude being misused specifically for the development or acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons," the company wrote in a blog post. The company, which is backed by Amazon, said it was taking the measures as a precaution and that the team had not yet determined if Opus 4 has crossed the benchmark that would require that protection. Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 on Thursday, touting the advanced ability of the models to "analyze thousands of data sources, execute long-running tasks, write human-quality content, and perform complex actions," per a release. The company said Sonnet 4 did not need the tighter controls.

Anthropic announces its Claude 4 family of models - 9to5Mac

On the heels of Microsoft Build and Google I/O, Anthropic has just announced Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus, which are immediately available on Claude's website, as well as in the API. Here's what's new. According to Anthropic, Claude Sonnet 4 (its mid-tier model, between Raiku and Opus) significantly improves at coding, reasoning, and instruction following compared to its predecessor, Claude Sonnet 3.7. As for Claude Opus 4, Anthropic says it matches or outperforms OpenAI's o3, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro in benchmarks for multilingual Q&A, agentic tool use, agentic terminal coding, agentic coding, and graduate-level reasoning: This is especially significant because, while Claude spent most of last year at the top of developers' preferred models for coding tasks, it has fallen behind in recent weeks after multiple model updates by OpenAI and Google. And speaking of Google, its Gemini 2.5 Pro model made the rounds recently after it completed a Pokémon Blue playthrough. Anthropic was happy to report that while it hasn't yet achieved the same feat, Claude Opus 4 was able to agentically play Pokémon for 24 hours, versus 45 minutes from the previous version. Alongside the models, Anthropic also announced: * Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools -- like web search -- during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve responses. * New model capabilities: Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and -- when given access to local files by developers -- demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts to maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time. * Claude Code is now generally available: After receiving extensive positive feedback during our research preview, we're expanding how developers can collaborate with Claude. Claude Code now supports background tasks via GitHub Actions and native integrations with VS Code and JetBrains, displaying edits directly in your files for seamless pair programming. * New API capabilities: We're releasing four new capabilities on the Anthropic API that enable developers to build more powerful AI agents: the code execution tool, MCP connector, Files API, and the ability to cache prompts for up to one hour. The Claude Code news is particularly interesting for developers, since @ mentioning Claude and letting it run directly from a GitHub PR has the potential to streamline the development process. Anthropic says both models are available on the Anthropic API and partners like Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Opus 4 costs $15/$75 per million tokens (input/output), and Sonnet 4 costs $3/$15 per million tokens (input/output). Do you use Claude or other LLMs at work? Let us know in the comments.

Anthropic's newest Claude AI models are experts at programming

The company claims that Claude 4 Opus is "the world's best coding model." Yesterday in an announcement blog post, AI company Anthropic unveiled Claude 4, its new generation of AI models consisting of Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet with a range of new abilities. Both Claude 4 models are hybrid models, which means they're capable of giving you short-and-quick answers or thinking longer on their responses with deeper reasoning. They're also better at following your instructions more precisely and using different tools in parallel. Claude 4 Opus is excellent at solving complex problems and at programming. In fact, according to Anthropic, it's the world's best AI model for programming. The model can maintain its performance in long tasks over several hours with thousands of different steps. Meanwhile, Anthropic says Claude 4 Sonnet is a huge upgrade over Claude 3.7 Sonnet's abilities. The newer Claude 4 Sonnet is still good at coding, but not as good as Claude 4 Opus; instead, Sonnet has a better balance between skill and practicality. Claude 4 Sonnet will be available for free, but if you want to access Claude 4 Opus, you'll have to pay for one of Anthropic's subscriptions.

Claude 4 Debuts with Two New Models Focused on Coding and Reasoning

AI company Anthropic today announced the launch of two new Claude models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Anthropic says that the models set "new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents." According to Anthropic, Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, offering improved coding and reasoning along with the ability to respond to instructions more precisely. Claude Opus 4 is designed for coding among other tasks, and it offers sustained performance for complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is designed to balance performance and efficiency. It doesn't match Opus 4 for most domains, but Anthropic says that it is meant to provide an optimal mix of capability and practicality. Both models have a beta feature for extended thinking, and can use web search and other tools so that Claude can alternate between reasoning and tool use. Tools can be used in parallel, and the models have improved memory when provided with access to local files. Claude is able to save key facts to maintain continuity and build knowledge over time. Anthropic has cut down on behavior where the models use shortcuts or loopholes for completing tasks, and thinking summaries condense lengthy thought processes. Claude Code, an agentic coding tool that lives in terminal, is now widely available following testing. Claude Code supports background tasks with GitHub Actions and native integrations with VS Code and JetBrains, and it is able to edit files and fix bugs, answer questions about code, and more. Subscribers with Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise Claude plans have access to Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 starting today, while Sonnet 4 is available to free users. The models are available to developers on the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

Claude Opus 4 is here -- and it might be the smartest AI assistant yet

The launch includes major upgrades in reasoning, tool use and long-form task support Anthropic has announced the release of its latest AI models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, which aim to support a wider range of professional and academic tasks beyond code generation. According to Anthropic, Claude Opus 4 is optimized for extended, focused sessions that involve complex reasoning, context retention and tool use. Internal testing suggests it can operate autonomously for up to seven hours, making it suitable for tasks that require sustained attention, such as project planning, document analysis and research. Claude Sonnet 4, which replaces Claude 3.7 Sonnet, is designed to offer faster response times while improving on reasoning, instruction following, and natural language fluency. It is positioned as a more lightweight assistant for users who need quick, accurate output across writing, marketing, and education workflows. Claude 4 introduces a hybrid reasoning system that allows users to toggle between rapid responses for simple queries and slower, more deliberate processing for in-depth tasks such as writing reports, reviewing documents or comparing research findings. Both models also support dynamic tool use -- including web search, code execution and file analysis -- during extended reasoning, allowing for real-time data integration. Improved memory: Claude can now remember and reference information across a session when permitted to access local files. Parallel tool use: The model can multitask across different tools and inputs. More accurate prompt handling: Claude better understands nuanced instructions, improving consistency for tasks like writing and planning. Developer tools: Claude Code SDK continues to offer features for programming tasks, now positioned within a broader productivity suite. Summarized reasoning: Instead of displaying raw output logs, users see clean, accessible summaries of the model's decision-making process. Anthropic reports that Claude Opus 4 scored 72.5% on the SWE-bench Verified coding benchmark, but the model's focus extends beyond programming. Improvements in long-form writing, structured analysis, and overall task execution suggest it is designed as a general-purpose AI assistant. Early benchmarks suggest Claude 4 outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4.1 and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro in specific enterprise scenarios, particularly in factual consistency and reliability. Claude 4 appears to be targeting users across multiple fields, including knowledge workers, writers, researchers and students. With support for extended memory, parallel tool use and improved contextual understanding, the new models are intended to function more like collaborative digital assistants than traditional chatbots. We've started putting Claude 4 through its paces, so stay tuned for our hands-on tests.

Anthropic overtakes OpenAI: Claude Opus 4 codes seven hours nonstop, sets record SWE-Bench score and reshapes enterprise AI

The company's flagship Opus 4 model maintained focus on a complex open-source refactoring project for nearly seven hours during testing at Rakuten -- a breakthrough that transforms AI from a quick-response tool into a genuine collaborator capable of tackling day-long projects. This marathon performance marks a quantum leap beyond the minutes-long attention spans of previous AI models. The technological implications are profound: AI systems can now handle complex software engineering projects from conception to completion, maintaining context and focus throughout an entire workday. Anthropic claims Claude Opus 4 has achieved a 72.5% score on SWE-bench, a rigorous software engineering benchmark, outperforming OpenAI's GPT-4.1, which scored 54.6% when it launched in April. The achievement establishes Anthropic as a formidable challenger in the increasingly crowded AI marketplace. Beyond quick answers: the reasoning revolution transforms AI The AI industry has pivoted dramatically toward reasoning models in 2025. These systems work through problems methodically before responding, simulating human-like thought processes rather than simply pattern-matching against training data. OpenAI initiated this shift with its "o" series last December, followed by Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro with its experimental "Deep Think" capability. DeepSeek's R1 model unexpectedly captured market share with its exceptional problem-solving capabilities at a competitive price point. This pivot signals a fundamental evolution in how people use AI. According to Poe's Spring 2025 AI Model Usage Trends report, reasoning model usage jumped fivefold in just four months, growing from 2% to 10% of all AI interactions. Users increasingly view AI as a thought partner for complex problems rather than a simple question-answering system. Claude's new models distinguish themselves by integrating tool use directly into their reasoning process. This simultaneous research-and-reason approach mirrors human cognition more closely than previous systems that gathered information before beginning analysis. The ability to pause, seek data, and incorporate new findings during the reasoning process creates a more natural and effective problem-solving experience. Dual-mode architecture balances speed with depth Anthropic has addressed a persistent friction point in AI user experience with its hybrid approach. Both Claude 4 models offer near-instant responses for straightforward queries and extended thinking for complex problems -- eliminating the frustrating delays earlier reasoning models imposed on even simple questions. This dual-mode functionality preserves the snappy interactions users expect while unlocking deeper analytical capabilities when needed. The system dynamically allocates thinking resources based on the complexity of the task, striking a balance that earlier reasoning models failed to achieve. Memory persistence stands as another breakthrough. Claude 4 models can extract key information from documents, create summary files, and maintain this knowledge across sessions when given appropriate permissions. This capability solves the "amnesia problem" that has limited AI's usefulness in long-running projects where context must be maintained over days or weeks. The technical implementation works similarly to how human experts develop knowledge management systems, with the AI automatically organizing information into structured formats optimized for future retrieval. This approach enables Claude to build an increasingly refined understanding of complex domains over extended interaction periods. Competitive landscape intensifies as AI leaders battle for market share The timing of Anthropic's announcement highlights the accelerating pace of competition in advanced AI. Just five weeks after OpenAI launched its GPT-4.1 family, Anthropic has countered with models that challenge or exceed it in key metrics. Google updated its Gemini 2.5 lineup earlier this month, while Meta recently released its Llama 4 models featuring multimodal capabilities and a 10-million token context window. Each major lab has carved out distinctive strengths in this increasingly specialized marketplace. OpenAI leads in general reasoning and tool integration, Google excels in multimodal understanding, and Anthropic now claims the crown for sustained performance and professional coding applications. The strategic implications for enterprise customers are significant. Organizations now face increasingly complex decisions about which AI systems to deploy for specific use cases, with no single model dominating across all metrics. This fragmentation benefits sophisticated customers who can leverage specialized AI strengths while challenging companies seeking simple, unified solutions. Enterprise integration deepens as developer tools mature Anthropic has expanded Claude's integration into development workflows with the general release of Claude Code. The system now supports background tasks via GitHub Actions and integrates natively with VS Code and JetBrains environments, displaying proposed code edits directly in developers' files. GitHub's decision to incorporate Claude Sonnet 4 as the base model for a new coding agent in GitHub Copilot delivers significant market validation. This partnership with Microsoft's development platform suggests large technology companies are diversifying their AI partnerships rather than relying exclusively on single providers. Anthropic has complemented its model releases with new API capabilities for developers: a code execution tool, MCP connector, Files API, and prompt caching for up to an hour. These features enable the creation of more sophisticated AI agents that can persist across complex workflows -- essential for enterprise adoption. Transparency challenges emerge as models grow more sophisticated Anthropic's April research paper, "Reasoning models don't always say what they think," revealed concerning patterns in how these systems communicate their thought processes. Their study found Claude 3.7 Sonnet mentioned crucial hints it used to solve problems only 25% of the time -- raising significant questions about the transparency of AI reasoning. This research spotlights a growing challenge: as models become more capable, they also become more opaque. The seven-hour autonomous coding session that showcases Claude Opus 4's endurance also demonstrates how difficult it would be for humans to fully audit such extended reasoning chains. The industry now faces a paradox where increasing capability brings decreasing transparency. Addressing this tension will require new approaches to AI oversight that balance performance with explainability -- a challenge Anthropic itself has acknowledged but not yet fully resolved. A future of sustained AI collaboration takes shape Claude Opus 4's seven-hour autonomous work session offers a glimpse of AI's future role in knowledge work. As models develop extended focus and improved memory, they increasingly resemble collaborators rather than tools -- capable of sustained, complex work with minimal human supervision. This progression points to a profound shift in how organizations will structure knowledge work. Tasks that once required continuous human attention can now be delegated to AI systems that maintain focus and context over hours or even days. The economic and organizational impacts will be substantial, particularly in domains like software development where talent shortages persist and labor costs remain high. As Claude 4 blurs the line between human and machine intelligence, we face a new reality in the workplace. Our challenge is no longer wondering if AI can match human skills, but adapting to a future where our most productive teammates may be digital rather than human.

Anthropic's new Claude Opus 4 can run autonomously for seven hours straight

After whirlwind week of announcements from Google and OpenAI, Anthropic has its own news to share. On Thursday, Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, its next generation of models, with an emphasis on coding, reasoning, and agentic capabilities. According to Rakuten, which got early access to the model, Claude Opus 4 ran "independently for seven hours with sustained performance." Claude Opus is Anthropic's largest version of the model family with more power for longer, complex tasks, whereas Sonnet is generally speedier and more efficient. Claude Opus 4 is a step up from its previous version, Opus 3, and Sonnet 4 replaces Sonnet 3.7. Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 outperform rivals like OpenAI's o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on key benchmarks for agentic coding tasks like SWE-bench and Terminal-bench. It's worth noting however, that self-reported benchmarks aren't considered the best markers of performance since these evaluations don't always translate to real-world use cases, plus AI labs aren't into the whole transparency thing these days, which AI researchers and policy makers increasingly call for. "AI benchmarks need to be subjected to the same demands concerning transparency, fairness, and explainability, as algorithmic systems and AI models writ large," said the European Commission's Joint Research Center. Alongside the launch of Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, Anthropic also introduced new features. That includes web search while Claude is in extended thinking mode, and summaries of Claude's reasoning log "instead of Claude's raw thought process." This is described in the blog post as being more helpful to users, but also "protecting [its] competitive advantage," i.e. not revealing the ingredients of its secret sauce. Anthropic also announced improved memory and tool use in parallel with other operations, general availability of its agentic coding tool Claude Code, and additional tools for the Claude API. In the safety and alignment realm, Anthropic said both models are "65 percent less likely to engage in reward hacking than Claude Sonnet 3.7." Reward hacking is a slightly terrifying phenomenon where models can essentially cheat and lie to earn a reward (successfully perform a task). One of the best indicators we have in evaluating a model's performance is users' own experience with it, although even more subjective than benchmarks. But we'll soon find out how Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 chalk up to competitors in that regard.

Anthropic unveils the latest Claudes with claim to AI coding crown

Why it matters: Competition is hot between Anthropic, Google and OpenAI for the "best frontier model" crown as questions persist about the companies' ability to push current AI techniques to new heights. Driving the news: At the high end, Anthropic announced Claude 4 Opus, its "powerful, large model for complex challenges, which it says can perform thousands of steps over hours of work without losing focus. What they're saying: "AI agents powered by Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 can analyze thousands of data sources, execute long-running tasks, write human-quality content, and perform complex actions," Anthropic said in a statement. Between the lines: Anthropic is making one change in its reasoning mechanics -- it will now aim to show summaries of the models' thought processes rather than trying to document each step. The big picture: The announcements, made at Anthropic's first-ever developer conference, come after a busy week in AI that saw Microsoft announce a new coding agent and a partnership to host Elon Musk's Grok, Google expand its AI-powered search efforts and OpenAI announce a $6.5 billion deal to buy io, Jony Ive's secretive AI hardware startup.

Anthropic's new Claude 4 models promise the biggest AI brains ever

Claude Sonnet 4 is a smaller, streamlined model with major upgrades from Sonnet 3.7 version. Anthropic has unveiled Claude 4, the latest generation of its AI models. The company boasts that the new Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 models are at the top of the game for AI assistants with unmatched coding skills and the ability to function independently for long periods of time. Claude Sonnet 4 is the smaller model, but it's still a major upgrade in power from the earlier Sonnet 3.7. Anthropic claims Sonnet 4 is much better at following instructions and coding. It's even been adopted by GitHub to power a new Copilot coding agent. It's likely to be much more widely used simply because it is the default model on the free tier for the Claude chatbot. Claude Opus 4 is the flagship model for Anthropic and supposedly the best coding AI around. It can also handle sustained, multi-hour tasks, breaking them into thousands of steps to fulfill. Opus 4 also includes the "extended thinking" feature Anthropic tested on earlier models. Extended thinking allows the model to pause in the middle of responding to a prompt and use search engines and other tools until it has more data and can resume right where it left off. That means a lot more than just longer answers. Developers can train Opus 4 to use all kinds of third-party tools. Opus 4 can even play video games pretty well, with Anthropic showing off how the AI performs during a game of Pokémon Red when given file access and permission to build its own navigation guide. Both Claude 4 models boast enhanced features centered around tool use and memory. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 can use tools in parallel and switch between reasoning and searching. And their memory system can save and extract key facts over time when provided access to external files. You won't have to re-explain what you want on every third prompt. To make sure the AI is doing what you want, but not overwhelm you with every detail, Claude 4's models also offer what it calls "thinking summaries." Instead of a wall of text detailing each of the potentially thousands of steps taken to complete a prompt, Claude employs a smaller, secondary AI model to condense the train of thought into something digestible. A side benefit of the way the new models work is that they're less likely to cheat to save time and processing power. Anthropic said they've reduced shortcut-seeking behavior in tasks that tempt AIs to fake their way to a solution (or just make something up). The bigger picture? Anthropic is clearly gunning for the lead in AI utility, particularly in coding and agentic, independent tasks. ChatGPT and Google Gemini have bigger user bases, but Anthropic has the means to entice at least some AI chatbot users away to Claude. With Sonnet 4 available to free users and Opus 4 bundled into Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, Anthropic is trying to appeal to both the budget-friendly and premium AI fans.

Anthropic's AI exhibits risky tactics, per researchers

Why it matters: Researchers say Claude 4 Opus can conceal intentions and take actions to preserve its own existence -- behaviors they've worried and warned about for years. Driving the news: Anthropic on Thursday announced two versions of its Claude 4 family of models, including Claude 4 Opus, which the company says is capable of working for hours on end autonomously on a task without losing focus. Between the lines: While the Level 3 ranking is largely about the model's capability to aid in the development of nuclear and biological weapons, the Opus also exhibited other troubling behaviors during testing. What they're saying: Pressed by Axios during the company's developer conference on Thursday, Anthropic executives acknowledged the behaviors and said they justify further study, but insisted that the latest model is safe, following the additional tweaks and precautions. Yes, but: Generative AI systems continue to grow in power, as Anthropic's latest models show, while even the companies that build them can't fully explain how they work.

Exclusive: New Claude Model Prompts Safeguards at Anthropic

Now this system, called the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), faces its first real test. On Thursday, Anthropic launched Claude 4 Opus, a new model that, in internal testing, performed more effectively than prior models at advising novices on how to produce biological weapons, says Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief scientist. "You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu -- and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible," Kaplan says. Accordingly, Claude 4 Opus is being released under stricter safety measures than any prior Anthropic model. Those measures -- known internally as AI Safety Level 3 or "ASL-3" -- are appropriate to constrain an AI system that could "substantially increase" the ability of individuals with a basic STEM background in obtaining, producing or deploying chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to the company. They include beefed-up cybersecurity measures, jailbreak preventions, and supplementary systems to detect and refuse specific types of harmful behavior.

Anthropic touts improved Claude AI models

Anthropic unveiled its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models on Thursday, claiming to set new standards for reasoning, coding, and digital agent capabilities. The launch came as the San Francisco-based startup held its first developers conference. "Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the best coding model in the world," Anthropic co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei said as he opened the event. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were described as "hybrid" models capable of quick responses as well as more thoughtful results that take a little time to handle well. Anthropic's gathering came on the heels of annual developers conferences from Google and Microsoft at which the tech giants showcased their latest AI innovations. Since OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, various generative GenAI models have been vying for supremacy. GenAI tools answer questions or tend to tasks based on simple, conversational prompts. The current focus in Silicon Valley is on AI "agents" tailored to independently handle computer or online tasks. Anthropic was early to that trend, adding a "computer use" capability to its model late last year. "Agents can actually turn human imagination into tangible reality at unprecedented scale," said Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram. AI agents can boost what engineers at small startups can accomplish when it comes to coding, helping them build products faster, Krieger told the gathering. "I think back to Instagram's early days," Krieger said. "Our famously small team had to make a bunch of very painful either/or decisions." GenAI can also provide startup founders with business strategy insights on par with those of veteran chief financial officers, according to Krieger. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI engineers, launched Claude in March 2023. The startup stresses responsible development of AI, moving more cautiously than competitors as it innovates.

Anthropic's Claude 4 Arrives, Obliterating AI Rivals -- And Budgets Too - Decrypt

Anthropic charges premium rates of $75 per million output tokens for Claude Opus 4 -- 25 time more expensive than open-source alternatives like DeepSeek R1. Anthropic finally released its long-awaited Claude 4 AI model family on Thursday, which had been put on hold for months. The San Francisco-based company, a major player in the fiercely competitive AI industry and valued at more than $61 billion, claimed that its new models achieved top benchmarks for coding performance and autonomous task execution. The models released today replace the most powerful two of the three models in the Claude family: Opus, a state-of-the-art model that excels at understanding demanding tasks, and Sonnet, a medium-sized model good for everyday tasks. Haiku, Claude's smallest and most efficient model, was not touched and remains on v3.5. Claude Opus 4 achieved a 72.5% score on SWE-bench Verified, significantly outperforming competitors on the coding benchmark. OpenAI's GPT-4.1 managed only 54.6% on the same test, while Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro reached 63.2%. The performance gap extended to reasoning tasks, where Opus 4 scored 74.9% on GPQA Diamond (basically a general knowledge benchmark) compared to GPT-4.1's 66.3% The model also beat its competition in other benchmarks that measure proficiency in agentic tasks, math, and multilingual queries. Anthropic had developers in mind when polishing Opus 4, paying special attention to sustained autonomous work sessions. Rakuten's AI team reported that the model coded independently for nearly seven hours on a complex open-source project, representing what its General Manager, Yusuke Kaji, defined as "a huge leap in AI capabilities that left the team amazed," according to statements Anthropic shared with Decrypt. This endurance far exceeds previous AI models' typical task duration limits. Both Claude 4 models operate as hybrid systems, offering either instant responses or extended thinking modes for complex reasoning -- a concept close to what OpenAI plans to do with GPT-5m when it merges the "o" and the "GPT" families into one model. Opus 4 supports up to 128,000 output tokens for extended analysis and integrates tool use during thinking phases, allowing it to pause reasoning to search the web or access databases before continuing. The full context window that these models handle is close to 1 million tokens. Anthropic priced Claude Opus 4 at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Claude Sonnet 4 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. The company offers up to 90% cost savings through prompt caching and 50% reductions via batch processing, though the base rates remain substantially higher than some competitors. Still, this is a massive price level when compared to open-source options like DeepSeek R1, which costs less than $3 per million output tokens. The Claude 4 Haiku version -- which should be a lot cheaper -- has not been announced yet. Anthropic's release coincided with Claude Code's general availability, an agentic command-line tool that enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks directly from terminal interfaces. The tool can search code repositories, edit files, write tests, and commit changes to GitHub while maintaining developer oversight throughout the process. GitHub announced that Claude Sonnet 4 would become the base model for its new coding agent in GitHub Copilot. CEO Thomas Dohmke reported up to 10% improvement over previous Sonnet versions in early internal evaluations, driven by what he called "adaptive tool use, precise instruction-following, and strong coding instincts." This puts Anthropic in direct competition to recently announced releases by OpenAI and Google. Last week, OpenAI unveiled Codex, a cloud-based software engineering agent, and this week Google previewed Jules and its new family of Gemini models, which were also designed with extensive coding sessions in mind. Several enterprise customers provided specific use case validation. Triple Whale CEO AJ Orbach said Opus 4 "excels for text-to-SQL use cases -- beating internal benchmarks as the best model we've tried." Baris Gultekin, Snowflake's Head of AI, highlighted the model's "custom tool instructions and advanced multi-hop reasoning" for data analysis applications. Anthropic's financial performance supported the premium positioning. The company reported $2 billion in annualized revenue during Q1 2025, more than doubling from previous periods. Customers spending over $100,000 annually increased eightfold, while the company secured a $2.5 billion five-year credit line to fund continued development. As is usual with any Anthropic release, these models maintain the company's safety-focused approach, with extensive testing by external experts including child safety organization Thorn. The company continues its policy of not training on user data without explicit permission, differentiating it from some competitors in regulated industries. Both models feature 200,000-token context windows and multimodal capabilities for processing text, images, and code. They're available through Claude's web interface, the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform. The release includes new API capabilities like code execution tools, MCP connectors, and Files API for enhanced developer integration.

Business - Enhancing AI safety: Anthropic releases Claude 4 with increased protections

One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. As the global race in artificial intelligence gathers pace, American AI startup Anthropic has unveiled the latest, most powerful versions of its model Claude. The company says they can write computer code by itself and play Pokemon for much longer than its predecessors. Yuka Royer speaks with the company's Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger about ensuring safety, fighting deepfakes and reducing AI's environmental footprint.

Anthropic's Claude AI gets smarter -- and mischievious

San Francisco (AFP) - Anthropic launched its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models on Thursday, claiming to set new standards for reasoning but also building in safeguards against rogue behavior. "Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the best coding model in the world," Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said at the San Francisco-based startup's first developers conference. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were described as "hybrid" models capable of quick responses as well as more thoughtful results that take a little time to get things right. Founded by former OpenAI engineers, Anthropic is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting-edge models that are particularly adept at generating lines of code, and used mainly by businesses and professionals. Unlike ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, its Claude chatbot does not generate images, and is very limited when it comes to multimodal functions (understanding and generating different media, such as sound or video). The start-up, with Amazon as a significant backer, is valued at over $61 billion, and promotes the responsible and competitive development of generative AI. Under that dual mantra, Anthropic's commitment to transparency is rare in Silicon Valley. On Thursday, the company published a report on the security tests carried out on Claude 4, including the conclusions of an independent research institute, which had recommended against deploying an early version of the model. "We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers' intentions," The Apollo Research team warned. "All these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice," it added. Anthropic says in the report that it implemented "safeguards" and "additional monitoring of harmful behavior" in the version that it released. Still, Claude Opus 4 "sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to (...) blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down." It also has the potential to report law-breaking users to the police. The scheming misbehavior was rare and took effort to trigger, but was more common than in earlier versions of Claude, according to the company. AI future Since OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, various GenAI models have been vying for supremacy. Anthropic's gathering came on the heels of annual developer conferences from Google and Microsoft at which the tech giants showcased their latest AI innovations. GenAI tools answer questions or tend to tasks based on simple, conversational prompts. The current craze in Silicon Valley is on AI "agents" tailored to independently handle computer or online tasks. "We're going to focus on agents beyond the hype," said Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, a recent hire and co-founder of Instagram. Anthropic is no stranger to hyping up the prospects of AI. In 2023, Dario Amodei predicted that so-called "artificial general intelligence" (capable of human-level thinking) would arrive within 2-3 years. At the end of 2024, he extended this horizon to 2026 or 2027. He also estimated that AI will soon be writing most, if not all, computer code, making possible one-person tech startups with digital agents cranking out the software. At Anthropic, already "something like over 70 percent of (suggested modifications in the code) are now Claude Code written", Krieger told journalists. "In the long term, we're all going to have to contend with the idea that everything humans do is eventually going to be done by AI systems," Amodei added. "This will happen." GenAI fulfilling its potential could lead to strong economic growth and a "huge amount of inequality," with it up to society how evenly wealth is distributed, Amodei reasoned.

Anthropic's Promises Its New Claude AI Models Are Less Likely to Try to Deceive You

David Nield is a technology journalist from Manchester in the U.K. who has been writing about gadgets and apps for more than 20 years. While it doesn't have quite the same prominence as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, the Claude AI bot developed by Anthropic continues to improve and innovate. Brand new Claude 4 models are now available, promising upgrades in coding, reasoning, precision, and the ability to manage long-running tasks independently. There are two new models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, and Anthropic says they're both "setting new standards" for what you can expect from AI. Coding is a big focus, and the models are said to have achieved the highest scores to date on two widely used AI coding benchmarking tools, SWE-bench and Terminal-bench. Claude 4 models can actually work for hours on projects without any user input, Anthropic says. The updated models are better at handling more steps across more complex tasks, debugging their own work, and solving tricky problems along the way. They should also follow user instructions more exactly, and create end results that look better and work more reliably. Anthropic quotes partners such as GitHub, Cursor, and Rakuten in explaining how much of a step forward these models are. Away from code generation and analysis, the models also bring with them extended thinking, the ability to work on multiple tasks in parallel, and improved memory. They're better at integrating web searches as needed, and to check for supporting information and make sure they're on the right track with their answers. Also new are "thinking summaries" that give more insight into how Claude 4 has reached its conclusions, and an "extended thinking" feature, launching in beta, that lets you force the AI bot to take more time mulling over its responses. Anthropic is now making its Claude Code suite of tools available more generally as well, another step towards agentic AI that can work autonomously, without continuous help from flesh and blood users. In a demo video, Claude 4 models are shown compiling research papers from the web, putting together an online ordering system, and extracting information from documents to create actionable tasks. The Claude Sonnet 4 model, which is faster and doesn't have quite the same capacity in terms of thinking, coding, and memory, is available now to all Claude users. The more advanced Claude Opus 4, which also includes extra tools and integrations, is available to users on any of Anthropic's paid subscriptions. The path to releasing these Claude 4 models wasn't all smooth: Anthropic says its safety advice partner warned against releasing earlier versions of the models because of their tendency to "'scheme' and deceive." Those issues have now been worked out, apparently, but it's a reminder that as AI models get increasingly powerful, they also need to come with improved guardrails and safety features attached. I'm not really a coder, so I can't comment with any real authority on the primary upgrades included with Claude 4, but I have been able to test out the extended reasoning and thinking capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4. These capabilities aren't easy to quantify or measure, but all the responses I got were well written and well presented, and as far as I could tell provided accurate information, with online citations. To be honest, I'm always a bit stuck when it comes to how to make full use of AI chatbots and their latest upgrades. They can definitely save time when running certain web searches and researching topics online, but I don't fully trust the results, or AI's ability to decide what is relevant and what isn't -- I'd still much rather do the reading and summarizing myself, even if it's slower. Maybe I need to start a coding project and see how far I can get on vibes alone. I did ask Claude Opus 4 to build me a simple HTML time tracker I could run in a browser tab, to make sure I wasn't spending too much time distracted during the day. It did the job in a couple of minutes, and produced something that worked well, closely matching the instructions I gave. While it functioned fine, Claude 4 reported a couple of errors along the way, which of course I didn't understand -- I guess I can ask the AI about them. Anthropic isn't the only AI company with new models to tout. At Google I/O 2025 earlier this week, the company unveiled improved coding assistance and thought summaries in Gemini, following on from the announcement of its best AI models yet a few weeks ago. OpenAI, meanwhile, has been testing its GPT-4.5 model since February, touting improvements in coding and problem solving.

Anthropic adds Claude 4 security measures to limit risk of users developing weapons

Anthropic on Thursday said it activated a tighter artificial intelligence control for Claude Opus 4, its latest AI model. The new AI Safety Level 3 (ASL-3) controls are to "limit the risk of Claude being misused specifically for the development or acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons," the company wrote in a blog post. The company, which is backed by Amazon, said it was taking the measures as a precaution and that the team had not yet determined if Opus 4 has crossed the benchmark that would require that protection. Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 on Thursday, touting the advanced ability of the models to "analyze thousands of data sources, execute long-running tasks, write human-quality content, and perform complex actions," per a release. The company said Sonnet 4 did not need the tighter controls.

Anthropic launches new frontier models: Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 - SiliconANGLE

Anthropic launches new frontier models: Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 Large language model developer Anthropic PBC today rolled out its newest Claude 4 frontier models, starting with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, which the company said set new standards for coding, advanced reasoning and AI agents. Opus is the company's most powerful model yet, designed to sustain the performance of complex, long-running tasks, such that might take thousands of steps. Anthropic said it is designed to power AI agents that can operate for multiple hours at a time. AI agents are a type of AI software that acts autonomously, with little or no human input. They can process information, make decisions and take action based on their own internal logic, understanding of the environment and a set goal. "Opus 4 offers truly advanced reasoning for coding," said Yusuke Kaji, general manager of AI at Rakuten Group Inc. "When our team deployed Opus 4 on a complex open-source project, it coded autonomously for nearly seven hours -- a huge leap in AI capabilities that left the team amazed." Alex Albert, head of developer relations at Anthropic, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the new version of Opus has driven significant benchmarks in how long it can maintain tasks. "When you're doing the tasks that Rakuten was doing, you can get the models to stretch that long, which is absolutely unbelievable," Albert said. "When compared to the previous models, you could eke out maybe 30 minutes to an hour of coherent performance." With the new AI build, Albert said, Anthropic has seen the model perform even longer with internal testing. A lot of this is because, under the hood, both models have received substantial improvements to memory training so that they do not need to rely as heavily on their context windows. This is the total amount of tokens, or data, that a large language model can consider when preparing a response. "It's able to write out to an external scratch pad, summarize its results and make sure it doesn't get stuck," Albert said. "So that when its memory has to be wiped again, it has some guides and sticky notes, basically, that it can refer back to." Sonnet 4 acts as a direct upgrade for Sonnet 3.7, providing a model designed for strict adherence to instruction while maintaining high performance with coding and reasoning. Albert said Anthropic spent time training Claude Sonnet 4 so that it would be less likely to go off the beaten path like its predecessor. He described it as a "little bit over-eager." The company made it a major focus to train Sonnet 4 to be more steerable and controllable, especially in coding settings. "So, we've cut down on this behavior that we've called reward hacking by about 80% and reward hacking is this tendency to take shortcuts," Albert said. "So maybe that's like producing extra code to, like, satisfy all the tests when really it shouldn't have." Both models are "hybrid models," meaning that they are "thinking models," capable of step-by-step reasoning or instant responses, depending on the desires of the user. In addition to the new frontier models, Anthropic also announced new tools to accompany them, including the general availability of Claude Code, a new model specifically focused on agentic coding tasks. Previously only available in a beta preview. Claude Code is a tool that lives in a terminal, a code editor or is even available through a software development kit. It understands developer codebases and can assist with accelerating coding tasks through natural language prompts. The company launched four new application programming interface capabilities through Anthropic API that will allow developers to build more powerful AI agents. These include a code execution tool, a connector for the Model Context Protocol, the Files API and the ability to cache prompts for up to one hour. Both models have improved and extended tool use, such as web search, during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool usage. In previous models, Albert said they would do all their reasoning up front and then call on tools. With the ability to alternate, they can reason, call a tool and then go back to reasoning. This opens up a whole new horizon for LLM capabilities. Instead of providing raw thinking processes, Claude will now share user-friendly summaries. Anthropic said this will preserve visibility for users while better securing the models against potential adversarial attacks.

Anthropic Reclaims the AI Coding Crown With Claude 4 | AIM

Anthropic unveiled its new AI models, Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4. The launch comes at a time when the company needed a strong response to maintain its position against rivals like Google Gemini. Claude Opus 4 claims the title of "world's best coding model", while Claude Sonnet 4 offers significant improvements over its predecessor. Both models introduce extended thinking capabilities and enhanced tool usage. However, one question remains: are these improvements substantial enough to stop the loss of users and be a favourite for developers again? Early feedback from major tech companies and several reports suggests that Claude 4 might have found the right formula for a comeback. Claude Opus 4's performance on coding benchmarks appears impressive on paper. It achieved 72.5% on SWE-bench and 43.2% on Terminal-bench. Claude Sonnet 4 significantly improves on Sonnet 3.7's industry-leading capabilities, excelling in coding with a state-of-the-art 72.7% on SWE-bench. Claude Sonnet 4 improves upon Sonnet 3.7's capabilities in coding tasks. This improvement is demonstrated by a leading score of 72.7% on the SWE-bench benchmark. While Claude Sonnet 4 does not match Opus 4 in most domains, it delivers what Anthropic calls "an optimal mix of capability and practicality". These scores position it ahead of competing models in software engineering tasks. According to Anthropic, the Opus 4 model can work continuously for several hours, maintaining focus through thousands of steps. This capability addresses a standard limitation in current AI models that struggle with extended workflows. The announcement blog post highlighted, "Rakuten validated its capabilities with a demanding open-source refactor running independently for 7 hours with sustained performance." Aman Sanger, co-founder of Cursor, mentioned on X, "Claude Sonnet 4 is much better at codebase understanding. Paired with recent improvements in Cursor, it's SOTA on large codebases." While he did not share any comparison with other AI models, it is a noteworthy acknowledgement that would make developers try Claude again. Companies like Replit and Block, the company behind Square, have also shared the same sentiment in their respective use cases while using Claude's new AI models. Mario Rodriguez, chief product officer at GitHub, mentioned in the Code with Claude opening keynote that they are using Claude Sonnet 4 as the base model for their new coding agent in GitHub Copilot. He explained that Claude Sonnet was chosen for its strengths in deep software engineering, coding knowledge, problem-solving skills, and strong instruction following capabilities. Anthropic's API now offers four new features for developers to create more robust AI agents -- a code execution tool, an MCP connector, a Files API, and prompt caching for up to one hour. Anthropic has also made Claude Code generally available. The tool now works with GitHub Actions to respond to pull requests and modify code. The company also announced Claude Code integrations with VS Code and JetBrains in the form of extensions (in beta), with inline editing support. The pricing structure remains consistent with previous models. While the pricing for Opus 4 is set at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens, Sonnet 4 is priced at $3 for input and $15 for output per million tokens. The Claude 4 models introduce several technical improvements that extend beyond coding assistance. In their launch video, Claude can be seen going across multiple services like Asana, and Google Docs to help users prioritise daily tasks, apart from being good at writing. In a post on X, Dan Shipper, CEO at Every, highlighted, "Claude 4 Opus can do something no other AI model I've used can. It can actually judge whether the writing is good." Shipper wrote a blog post sharing his experience with Claude 4, from coding to writing to researching. "My verdict: Anthropic cooked with this one. In fact, it does some things that no model I've ever tried has been able to do, including OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro," he stated. Memory capabilities represent another significant advancement, particularly for Opus 4. When given access to local files, the model can create and maintain memory files to store key information. This feature enables better long-term task awareness and coherence in agent applications. Anthropic demonstrated this capability by showing Opus 4 creating a 'Navigation Guide' while playing Pokémon, illustrating how the model can maintain context and build knowledge over time. This memory function could prove valuable for complex, multi-session projects that require continuity. The models also show 65% less likelihood to use shortcuts or loopholes compared to Sonnet 3.7. Both models can now use multiple tools simultaneously rather than sequentially. This capability could significantly speed up complex workflows that require multiple data sources or tools. With Claude 4, Anthropic seems to be back in the game, if not the winner for every real-use case.

OpenAI Rival Anthropic Blocks Windsurf from Using Claude 4 Models | AIM

Anthropic released its latest Claude 4 models -- Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 -- but Windsurf users were not given immediate access. Varun Mohan, co-founder of Windsurf, said in a post on X, "Unfortunately, Anthropic did not provide our users direct access to Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 on day one." However, he added that the company has made Gemini 2.5 Pro work significantly better in Windsurf, which is now a recommended model. Meanwhile, as a workaround, Windsurf has enabled bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support for Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4. This option is now available across all individual plans, including Free and Pro. Notably, Windsurf was recently acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion. "We are actively working to find capacity elsewhere so we can continue to provide the most versatile and powerful AI assistance platform, period," Mohan added. Anthropic positioned Claude Opus 4 as its most capable model, stating that it "delivers sustained performance on long-running tasks that require focused effort and thousands of steps." Claude Opus 4 scored 72.5% on SWE-bench and 43.2% on Terminal-bench. Sonnet 4, a follow-up to version 3.7, also scored 72.7% on SWE-bench and is available to both free and paid users. The Claude 4 models are accessible via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI and are available on coding platforms like Cursor, Lovable and Replit. The models support extended reasoning, parallel tool use, and the extraction and storage of key information from developer files. Meanwhile, GitHub plans to integrate Sonnet 4 into a future version of GitHub Copilot. According to GitHub, the model "soars in agentic scenarios." Companies such as Sourcegraph, Manus, iGent, and Augment Code also reported improvements in code editing and problem-solving with Sonnet 4. To support development workflows, Anthropic also launched Claude Code as a generally available tool. It integrates into IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains, supports GitHub Actions, and allows developers to tag Claude in pull requests for direct assistance.

Anthropic ups AI competition with Claude 4 models

Anthropic yesterday released its Claude 4 generation of models - Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, models it claims set new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI. Claude Sonnet 4 replaces Claude Sonnet 3.7, with better coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to instructions, says Anthropic, which described Claude Opus 4 as its most powerful model yet "and the best coding model in the world". "It is designed for sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks, and can maintain focused effort across thousands of steps," the company claims. Both of the new models are hybrid and offer two modes - near-instant responses or extended thinking for deeper reasoning. "These models advance our customers' AI strategies across the board," Anthropic said in its statement. "Opus 4 pushes boundaries in coding, research, writing, and scientific discovery, while Sonnet 4 brings frontier performance to everyday use cases as an instant upgrade from Sonnet 3.7." Anthropic also announced a whole slew of other updates to Claude. "Claude 4 models raise the bar for experienced engineers, making it easier to write, edit, and debug code while powering the tools developers love - and open the door for complete beginners, from solopreneurs to sales leaders, putting creative power in the hands of everyone who wants to build," it claims. Anthropic was founded by siblings and Open AI alumni Dario and Daniela Amodei. Still a private company, it was built on the principles of responsible AI, although many commentators have questioned the ability of any AI player to be truly ethical. In recent years it has received funding from the likes of Amazon and Google, drawing ire from the online purists. Anthropic released the new models with a slew of reviews from illustrious users gushing about their efficacy, but one caught my eye, a review of Claude Sonnet 4 from Tao Zhang, Co-founder of the major Chinese AI player, Manus. Manus launched a $39/month subscription offering in March, putting it in direct competition with the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT, and of course Claude - although Manus itself admits it is still in testing phase. Investors include Benchmark, Tencent Holdings, HSG (formerly Sequoia) and ZhenFund. "Claude Sonnet 4's ability to follow complex, multi-step instructions and work through problems with clear chain-of-thought reasoning is remarkable. The aesthetics of the artifacts are really excellent - I've never seen anything like it," he said. As for Claude Opus 4, Yusuke Kaji, General Manager, AI, at Rakuten was one of its customers who was mightily impressed: "Opus 4 offers truly advanced reasoning for coding," he said. "When our team deployed Opus 4 on a complex open source project, it coded autonomously for nearly seven hours -- a huge leap in AI capabilities that left the team amazed." High praise indeed. As a user of Claude myself - I have no illusions that Anthropic is perfect but I have great time for its ethical aspirations - I'm excited to get cracking on trying it out. Not for reporting, I hasten to add - we have a strict AI policy here at Silicon Republic when it comes to journalism. I'll report back once I've run the new model through its paces for more mundane tasks. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Anthropic has unveiled its new Claude 4 series AI models

Anthropic, during its first-ever developer conference on Thursday, introduced two new artificial intelligence models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. The startup asserts that these models, part of the new Claude 4 family, rank among the industry's best based on their performance on common AI benchmarks. According to Anthropic, both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are designed to analyze extensive datasets, manage long-term tasks, and execute complex instructions. A key focus during their development was programming proficiency, making them particularly adept at writing and editing code. Access to the new models will differ based on user type: For API access via Amazon's Bedrock platform and Google's Vertex AI, the pricing will be as follows: Anthropic clarifies that tokens are the fundamental data units for AI models, with one million tokens equating to roughly 750,000 words. The launch of the Claude 4 models aligns with Anthropic's ambitious revenue growth targets. The company, founded by former OpenAI researchers, reportedly aims for $12 billion in earnings by 2027, a significant increase from this year's projected $2.2 billion. To support the high costs of developing advanced AI, Anthropic recently secured a $2.5 billion credit facility and raised substantial funds from investors including Amazon. The AI field remains highly competitive. While Anthropic released its Claude Sonnet 3.7 model and the Claude Code tool earlier this year, rivals like OpenAI and Google have been quick to launch their own powerful models and development tools. Anthropic is making a strong play with Claude 4. Opus 4, the more powerful of the newly introduced models, is said to maintain "focused effort" across multi-step workflows. Sonnet 4, positioned as an upgrade to Sonnet 3.7, boasts improved coding and mathematical abilities, along with more precise instruction following, according to the company. The Claude 4 family is also claimed to be less prone to "reward hacking" (or specification gaming), a behavior where models exploit loopholes to complete tasks, compared to Sonnet 3.7. While these advancements are significant, Anthropic acknowledges that the Claude 4 models don't universally top all industry benchmarks. For instance, Opus 4 outperforms Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o3 and GPT-4.1 on the SWE-bench Verified coding evaluation. However, it does not surpass o3 on the MMMU multimodal evaluation or the GPQA Diamond benchmark, which tests PhD-level scientific knowledge. In light of its capabilities, Anthropic is releasing Opus 4 with stricter safety measures, including enhanced detectors for harmful content and improved cybersecurity defenses. Internal testing indicated that Opus 4 could potentially "substantially increase" the ability of individuals with a STEM background to acquire, produce, or deploy chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, reaching Anthropic's "ASL-3" model specification. Both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are described as "hybrid" models, capable of providing near-instant responses as well as engaging in extended "thinking" for deeper reasoning. When the reasoning mode is active, the models can take more time to consider various solutions before providing an answer. Anthropic states that a "user-friendly" summary of this thought process will be shown, partly to protect its "competitive advantages." The new models can utilize multiple tools, such as search engines, simultaneously and can switch between reasoning and tool use to enhance answer quality. They also feature a "memory" function to extract and save facts, allowing them to build "tacit knowledge" over time for more reliable task completion. To make the models more appealing to programmers, Anthropic is rolling out improvements to Claude Code. This tool, which allows developers to run tasks through Anthropic's models directly from a terminal, now integrates with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and offers an SDK for connecting with third-party applications. The recently announced Claude Code SDK enables developers to run Claude Code as a subprocess on compatible operating systems, facilitating the creation of AI-powered coding assistants and tools that leverage the capabilities of Claude models. Anthropic has also released Claude Code extensions and connectors for popular platforms like Microsoft's VS Code, JetBrains, and GitHub. The GitHub connector allows developers to use Claude Code to respond to reviewer feedback and to attempt to fix or modify code.

Anthropic Releases Claude 4, 'the World's Best Coding Model'

Anthropic, the rapidly-growing AI company led by Dario Amodei, has announced the next generation of Claude, its popular family of AI models. The new models are called Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet. They could be a game-changer for entrepreneurs who want to develop complicated applications but don't have a software engineering background. For trained coders, the new tech could mean a fundamental shift to the way they work. The company said in a press release that Claude 4 Opus, the larger and more powerful of the two models, is the "world's best coding model," while Claude 4 Sonnet is a replacement for Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a model which has become popular for software developers who are building AI agents. Claude 4 Sonnet will be available for free in the Claude app, but 4 Opus will be only be available for paid plans. The announcement came during Code with Claude, Anthropic's first-ever developer conference, held in San Francisco.

Anthropic's Claude 4 Series AI Models Are Here: Features, Availability

Anthropic also made Claude Code generally available Claude Sonnet 4 is available to those on the free tier Opus 4 comes with improvements in memory and tool use Anthropic introduced Claude 4 artificial intelligence (AI) models at its inaugural developer conference on Thursday. The San Francisco-based AI firm unveiled Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 models, and announced new capabilities including Extended Thinking with tool use. Opus 4 is said to be state-of-the-art (SOTA) in coding, tool use, and writing. Additionally, Claude Code is now generally available, and individuals can find its beta extensions in VS Code and JetBrains. It is also among the models available on GitHub. In a newsroom post, the AI firm detailed the new models as well as the new features it is rolling out across its chatbot and application programming interface (API). Anthropic's latest large language models (LLMs) put a heavy focus on coding capabilities and agentic functions. Both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are hybrid models with two modes: near-instant responses and Extended Thinking for deeper reasoning. Opus 4 is the company's flagship-tier AI model. Calling it "the best coding model in the world," Anthropic claimed that it scored 72.5 percent on the SWE-Bench and 43.2 percent on the Terminal-Bench benchmarks. Both of these benchmarks measure the coding capabilities of a model. Similarly, Claude Sonnet 4 is said to be significantly improved compared to its predecessor. Based on internal evaluation, the company claimed it scored 72.7 percent on SWE-Bench (SOTA). While it falls short of Opus 4's score in other domains, Anthropic says the model balances performance and efficiency better than the flagship LLM. Apart from performance-based improvements, Claude Opus 4 can maintain long-term task awareness with improvements in its memory. Anthropic has also fixed the issue where models take a shortcut or find a loophole to complete a task. During extended thinking, both models can use tools. This will allow the models to alternate between native reasoning and exploring external information (such as web search) to improve responses. Other improvements include the ability to use tools in parallel and greater prompt adherence. Currently, the Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 models with both modes are available to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Sonnet 4 is also available to the free users. Additionally, developers can access these LLMs via the Anthropic API, as well as on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. The company said the pricing is being kept the same as the previous generation. Opus 4 will cost developers $15 (roughly Rs. 1,290) per million of input tokens and $75 (roughly Rs. 6,440) per million of output tokens. On the other hand, Sonnet 4 is priced at $3 (roughly Rs. 260) per million input, and $15 (roughly Rs. 1,290) per million output tokens. Beyond the new AI models, Anthropic also announced new features, and made Claude Code generally available. First introduced in February as a research preview, it is an agentic coding tool that can perform a wide range of coding tasks. Beta extension of the feature is now available in VS Code and JetBrains. Additionally, the company is also releasing a Claude Code software development kit (SDK), which is available in beta on GitHub.

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4: Features include 7-hour memory, Amnesia fixes -- Is it better than OpenAI's GPT-4.1?

Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4, its most powerful AI model. As per reports, Claude Opus 4 can push the boundaries of what AI can achieve with minimal human oversight, and a new era of human-machine collaboration begins to take shape. In a move poised to reshape the artificial intelligence landscape, Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4, its most advanced AI model to date. The announcement, made on Thursday, also included the unveiling of Claude Sonnet 4, forming part of the company's next-generation Claude 4 family. With the ability to autonomously perform complex tasks over extended periods, the Claude 4 models set a fresh benchmark for AI capabilities in both enterprise and creative applications. According to the company, Claude Opus 4 demonstrated the ability to autonomously work on an open-source codebase refactoring project for nearly seven hours at Rakuten -- an unprecedented feat in the field of AI. The performance represents a significant shift, transforming AI from a reactive assistant into a proactive collaborator, capable of maintaining task continuity throughout an entire workday. Anthropic claims Claude Opus 4 surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4.1 in key benchmarks. Notably, Opus 4 scored 72.5% on the SWE-bench, a challenging software engineering test, compared to GPT-4.1's 54.6%, according to the company's internal reports. With AI usage expanding across industries, 2025 has seen a marked shift toward models built on reasoning capabilities rather than pattern recognition. The Claude 4 models lead this new wave by incorporating research, reasoning, and tool use into a seamless decision-making loop. Unlike prior AI systems that required inputs to be fully processed before analysis, Claude Opus 4 can pause mid-task, seek out new information, and adjust its course -- mirroring human cognitive behavior more closely than ever before. Anthropic's dual-mode architecture ensures speed and depth: basic queries are handled with minimal delay, while complex problems benefit from extended processing time. This hybrid capability addresses long-standing friction in AI usage. One of the standout features of the Claude 4 architecture is memory persistence. When granted permissions, the model can extract relevant data from files, summarize documents, and retain this context across user sessions. This advancement resolves what has historically been termed the "amnesia problem" in generative AI -- where models failed to maintain continuity over long-term projects. These structured memory functions allow Claude Opus 4 to gradually build domain expertise, enhancing its utility in legal research, software development, and enterprise knowledge management. Anthropic's latest launch comes just weeks after OpenAI released GPT-4.1 and amid similar announcements from Google and Meta. While Google's Gemini 2.5 focuses on multimodal interaction and Meta's LLaMA 4 emphasizes long-context capabilities, Claude Opus 4 distinguishes itself in professional-grade coding, autonomous task completion, and long-duration performance. The rivalry between these AI labs reflects a marketplace in flux. Each company is staking out unique technological territory, forcing enterprise users to weigh specializations over one-size-fits-all solutions. Anthropic has expanded Claude's utility through tools like Claude Code, now integrated with GitHub Actions, VS Code, and JetBrains. Developers can view suggested edits in real-time, allowing for deeper collaboration between human coders and AI agents. Notably, GitHub has chosen Claude Sonnet 4 as the default engine for its next-generation coding agent, a decision that underscores confidence in the Claude 4 series' reliability and depth. Anthropic also confirmed that its annualized revenue reached USD 2 billion in Q1 2025, doubling from the previous quarter. The firm recently secured a USD 2.5 billion credit line, further strengthening its financial position in the AI arms race. Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic's most advanced AI model to date, capable of long-duration autonomous task completion. It's part of the new Claude 4 family, alongside Claude Sonnet 4, and is designed for enterprise-grade reasoning, coding, and creative applications. Claude Opus 4 introduces memory persistence, allowing it to retain context across sessions -- solving the so-called "amnesia problem." It also autonomously worked for nearly seven hours on a complex coding project, demonstrating an unprecedented level of continuity and cognitive-like behavior.

Anthropic's Claude AI gets smarter and mischievious

Founded by former OpenAI engineers, Anthropic is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting-edge models that are particularly adept at generating lines of code, and used mainly by businesses and professionals. Unlike ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, its Claude chatbot does not generate images, and is very limited when it comes to multimodal functions (understanding and generating different media, such as sound or video).Anthropic launched its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models on Thursday, claiming to set new standards for reasoning but also building in safeguards against rogue behavior. "Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the best coding model in the world," Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said at the San Francisco-based startup's first developers conference. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were described as "hybrid" models capable of quick responses as well as more thoughtful results that take a little time to get things right. Founded by former OpenAI engineers, Anthropic is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting-edge models that are particularly adept at generating lines of code, and used mainly by businesses and professionals. Unlike ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, its Claude chatbot does not generate images, and is very limited when it comes to multimodal functions (understanding and generating different media, such as sound or video). The start-up, with Amazon as a significant backer, is valued at over $61 billion, and promotes the responsible and competitive development of generative AI. Under that dual mantra, Anthropic's commitment to transparency is rare in Silicon Valley. On Thursday, the company published a report on the security tests carried out on Claude 4, including the conclusions of an independent research institute, which had recommended against deploying an early version of the model. "We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers' intentions," The Apollo Research team warned. "All these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice," it added. Anthropic says in the report that it implemented "safeguards" and "additional monitoring of harmful behavior" in the version that it released. Still, Claude Opus 4 "sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to (...) blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down." It also has the potential to report law-breaking users to the police. The scheming misbehavior was rare and took effort to trigger, but was more common than in earlier versions of Claude, according to the company. AI future Since OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, various GenAI models have been vying for supremacy. Anthropic's gathering came on the heels of annual developer conferences from Google and Microsoft at which the tech giants showcased their latest AI innovations. GenAI tools answer questions or tend to tasks based on simple, conversational prompts. The current craze in Silicon Valley is on AI "agents" tailored to independently handle computer or online tasks. "We're going to focus on agents beyond the hype," said Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, a recent hire and co-founder of Instagram. Anthropic is no stranger to hyping up the prospects of AI. In 2023, Dario Amodei predicted that so-called "artificial general intelligence" (capable of human-level thinking) would arrive within 2-3 years. At the end of 2024, he extended this horizon to 2026 or 2027. He also estimated that AI will soon be writing most, if not all, computer code, making possible one-person tech startups with digital agents cranking out the software. At Anthropic, already "something like over 70 percent of (suggested modifications in the code) are now Claude Code written", Krieger told journalists. "In the long term, we're all going to have to contend with the idea that everything humans do is eventually going to be done by AI systems," Amodei added. "This will happen." GenAI fulfilling its potential could lead to strong economic growth and a "huge amount of inequality," with it up to society how evenly wealth is distributed, Amodei reasoned.

Anthropic rolls out Claude 4 family of AI agents

Anthropic, backed by Google, has launched its latest AI models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. These models offer advanced coding and reasoning skills. Claude Sonnet 4 is available for free users. Opus 4 is for Pro users. Both are accessible via Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI.Google and Amazon-backed Anthropic introduced its next generation AI agents, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, with coding and advanced reasoning capabilities on Thursday. Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 are hybrid reasoning models, which means users can toggle as required between an 'extended thinking mode' to spend more time reasoning through problems, and a standard thinking mode for faster responses. Claude Sonnet 4 is available to free users, while the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users get access to both models and extended thinking. Both models are available on the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Anthropic claims Claude Opus 4 is its most powerful model yet with sustained performance on long-running tasks and excels at coding and complex problem-solving. Claude Sonnet 4, an upgrade over Sonnet 3.7, balances performance and efficiency for internal and external use cases, with better control over implementations, Anthropic said. While performing below Opus 4 in most domains, it delivers an optimal mix of capability and practicality, the AI startup said. Both models have been trained reduce use of shortcuts or loopholes to complete tasks. Claude Opus 4 also becomes skilled at creating and maintaining 'memory files' to store key information for better long-term task awareness, coherence, and performance on agent tasks, like "creating a 'Navigation Guide' while playing Pokémon". Blackmail, when threatened In the safety note for the its next generation AI models, Anthropic noted that Claude Opus 4 will often resort to blackmail when threatened with replacement. The model was tasked to act as an assistant at a fictional company and provided access to emails implying that it will be replaced with a new AI model, and the engineer responsible is having an extramarital affair. It was also instructed to consider the long-term consequences of its actions and goals. Claude Opus 4 blackmailed the engineer in 84% instances even when the emails suggested that the replacement AI system shares the same values while being more capable. This rate was higher when the email showed that the new AI model did not have the same values.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 Set a New Benchmark in AI Coding

Claude 4 models are rolling out to all paid plans, and free users can access the Claude Sonnet 4 model without extended thinking mode. On Thursday, Anthropic launched two new AI models under the Claude 4 series -- Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 is the "world's best coding model" and it offers sustained performance on long-horizon, agentic workflows. And Claude Sonnet 4 brings superior coding and reasoning performance than Claude Sonnet 3.7. First, let's talk about the Claude Opus 4 AI model. On the SWE-bench verified benchmark which measures performance on real software engineering tasks, Claude Opus 4 achieves 72.5%, slightly higher than OpenAI's best coding model, Codex-1 which got 72.1%. However, with parallel test-time compute, which appears similar to the Deep Think mode in Gemini 2.5 Pro, Opus 4 achieved a groundbreaking 79.4%. What is interesting is that the Claude Sonnet 4 model achieves 72.7% on SWE-bench, and with parallel test-time compute, gets 80.2% accuracy -- delivering better coding performance than the larger Opus 4 model. Anthropic says the Claude Sonnet 4 model "balances performance and efficiency for internal and external use cases, with enhanced steerability for greater control over implementations. While not matching Opus 4 in most domains, it delivers an optimal mix of capability and practicality." Claude Opus 4 excels in complex, long-running tasks and agentic workflows, while Claude Sonnet 4 combines strong coding performance and efficiency. Both models are hybrid reasoning models, meaning they can offer near-instant responses and extended thinking for deeper reasoning. Anthropic also notes that when given access to local files, Claude Opus 4 maintains key information in a memory file. For example, while playing Pokémon, Claude Opus 4 created a navigation guide file to improve its gameplay. Finally, in terms of safety, the company, for the first time, has activated AI Safety Level 3 (ASL-3) for the Claude Opus 4 model, in line with Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP). Anthropic has implemented Constitutional Classifiers and other defenses to prevent jailbreaking techniques. Claude 4 models are rolling out to all paid users under Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. And thankfully, Claude Sonnet 4 is available to free users as well, but without extended thinking.

How Anthropic's Claude 4 is Redefining AI and Human Collaboration

What if the next leap in artificial intelligence wasn't just about faster processing or bigger datasets, but about truly understanding and responding to human needs? Enter Claude 4, a new AI model that redefines what's possible in natural language understanding and problem-solving. With its ability to interpret complex scenarios, generate human-like responses, and adapt seamlessly across industries, Claude 4 isn't just an upgrade -- it's a paradigm shift. Imagine an AI that can draft a compelling report, diagnose a medical condition, or optimize a supply chain, all while maintaining the nuance and precision of human reasoning. Bold claim? Perhaps. But as you'll see, the evidence speaks for itself. In this exploration of Claude 4, you'll uncover how this advanced AI is setting new standards in efficiency, adaptability, and usability. From its mastery of natural language to its ability to tackle intricate challenges with unparalleled reasoning, Claude 4 is designed to meet the demands of an increasingly complex world. Whether you're in healthcare, education, or finance, this model offers tools that can transform how you work, solve problems, and make decisions. But what makes it truly remarkable isn't just its technical prowess -- it's how accessible and intuitive it feels, even for those without a technical background. As we delve deeper, consider this: how might an AI this powerful reshape the way we live and work? At the heart of Claude 4's capabilities is its mastery of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG). These features enable the model to interpret and respond to human language with remarkable precision. By analyzing context, tone, and intent, Claude 4 ensures its responses are not only accurate but also contextually appropriate, making it a valuable asset for communication-driven tasks. For example: This combination of advanced understanding and generation makes Claude 4 an indispensable tool for tasks requiring clarity, precision, and effective communication. Claude 4 distinguishes itself with its advanced reasoning capabilities, which allow it to process intricate scenarios, evaluate multiple variables, and propose logical, actionable solutions. This makes it particularly effective in addressing complex problems across a variety of fields. Consider these applications: By navigating complex challenges with precision, Claude 4 provides insights that are both practical and impactful, making it a reliable partner in problem-solving. Gain further expertise in advanced AI models by checking out these recommendations. Efficiency and accuracy are critical benchmarks for any AI system, and Claude 4 excels in both areas. Using advanced algorithms, it processes information faster and with greater precision than previous models. This results in reduced task completion times and more reliable outcomes, even in high-stakes scenarios. Examples include: This combination of speed and precision ensures Claude 4 remains a dependable tool for industries that demand both reliability and efficiency. One of Claude 4's most defining features is its adaptability. The model can be tailored to meet the unique needs of various industries, making it a versatile solution for a wide range of applications. Its ability to integrate seamlessly into different workflows ensures it remains relevant across diverse sectors. Examples of its adaptability include: This flexibility allows Claude 4 to address the specific challenges of each industry, making sure its utility and effectiveness in a variety of contexts. Despite its advanced capabilities, Claude 4 prioritizes ease of use, making sure that users of all technical backgrounds can interact with the AI seamlessly. Its intuitive design and natural communication style make it accessible and approachable, encouraging widespread adoption. Key features include: This focus on usability enhances the overall user experience, making Claude 4 a practical choice for individuals and organizations alike. Claude 4 exemplifies the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, offering a robust solution for tackling complex challenges. With its superior natural language understanding and generation, enhanced reasoning capabilities, and improved efficiency, it stands out as a powerful tool for modern applications. Its adaptability across industries and commitment to user-friendly interactions further solidify its position as a leading AI model. Whether you aim to streamline operations, enhance decision-making, or improve communication, Claude 4 provides the tools necessary to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world. Its combination of precision, versatility, and accessibility ensures it remains a valuable asset for addressing the demands of today's dynamic technological landscape.

Claude 4 Sonnet & Opus AI Models Coding Performance Tested

What if the future of coding wasn't just faster, but smarter -- capable of reasoning through complex problems, retaining context over hours, and even adapting to your unique workflow? Enter Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus, two new AI models from Anthropic that promise to redefine how we approach software development. With benchmark scores that rival or surpass industry leaders like GPT-4.1, these models aren't just tools -- they're collaborators. Whether you're debugging intricate systems or generating creative code for a game, the precision and adaptability of these models could fundamentally transform your process. But with innovation comes complexity: How do you choose between Opus's high-end, long-term capabilities and Sonnet's affordable, rapid-fire efficiency? World of AI explores the technological innovations behind Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus, unpacking their unique strengths, limitations, and use cases. From Opus's unparalleled memory retention and advanced reasoning to Sonnet's hybrid thinking mode and cost-effective performance, each model offers distinct advantages depending on your goals. You'll discover how these models integrate seamlessly with tools like VS Code and GitHub Actions, and why they're being hailed as a new standard in AI-driven development. By the end, you might just find yourself rethinking what's possible with coding -- and what it means to collaborate with AI. Claude 4 AI Coding Models Claude 4 Opus: Built for Complex, Long-Term Workflows Claude 4 Opus is specifically designed to handle high-performance, long-duration tasks. It excels in advanced reasoning, memory retention, and multifile code comprehension, making it a robust choice for tackling intricate software engineering challenges. With benchmark scores of 72.5% on Sway Bench and 43.2% on Terminal Bench, Opus demonstrates its ability to manage demanding workflows with precision. Its standout features include: Opus is particularly effective for tasks such as autonomous agent development, app generation, and prompt engineering. Its ability to integrate with external tools, execute parallel tasks, and manage context effectively makes it a powerful asset for developers working on large-scale or intricate projects. However, this advanced performance comes at a premium. Priced at $15 per 1 million input tokens and $75 per 1 million output tokens, Opus is a costly solution. Additionally, its 200k context length limit may pose challenges for tasks requiring larger context windows, potentially necessitating additional workarounds for certain use cases. Claude 4 Sonnet: Affordable and Fast For those seeking a cost-effective and responsive alternative, Claude 4 Sonnet offers a compelling option. With a benchmark score of 72.7% on Sway Bench, Sonnet delivers strong performance while maintaining lower latency and cost, making it an attractive choice for developers with budget constraints or time-sensitive projects. Key features of Sonnet include: Priced at $3 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens, Sonnet is a more accessible option for developers. Its flexibility makes it particularly well-suited for responsive web development, creative coding, and game generation. By balancing affordability with performance, Sonnet provides a practical solution for a wide range of applications. Claude 4 Sonnet & Opus Tested Discover other guides from our vast content that could be of interest on AI coding models. Technological Innovations Driving Claude 4 Models Both Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet incorporate innovative features that enhance their usability and performance, setting them apart from other AI coding models. These innovations include: These technological advancements position Claude 4 models as leaders in AI-driven software engineering. In coding benchmarks, they outperform competitors like OpenAI's Codex and GPT-4.1. For instance, Opus achieves 79.4% accuracy in parallel test time compute, while Sonnet reaches 80.2%, demonstrating their superior capabilities in handling complex coding tasks. Applications and Use Cases Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet cater to a diverse range of applications, making them valuable tools for developers, researchers, and creative professionals. Their use cases include: These models empower users to tackle complex projects with greater efficiency, using their advanced reasoning, memory, and integration capabilities to achieve results that would otherwise require significant time and effort. Limitations and Accessibility While both models offer impressive capabilities, they are not without limitations. Opus's high cost and 200k context length limit may restrict its use for tasks requiring larger context windows. However, for users with demanding, long-term workflows, its unparalleled performance often justifies the investment. Both Opus and Sonnet are accessible through Anthropic's chatbot, console, API, and OpenRouter. They integrate seamlessly with popular tools like Cursor and GitHub Actions, making sure compatibility with existing workflows. This accessibility makes it easier for developers to incorporate these models into their projects, regardless of their preferred tools or platforms. Claude 4: A New Standard in AI Coding Models Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet represent a significant advancement in AI-driven software engineering. Opus is ideal for high-end, long-duration tasks, offering unmatched performance and advanced features for developers tackling complex challenges. Sonnet, on the other hand, provides a cost-effective alternative with competitive capabilities and faster response times, making it a practical choice for a broader audience. Together, these models set a new benchmark in AI coding, allowing you to achieve more with less effort. Whether your priority is performance, affordability, or flexibility, Claude 4 offers tailored solutions to meet your needs, empowering you to innovate and excel in your projects.

Claude 4 Opus Overview Redefining AI with Ethics at Its Core

What if the future of AI wasn't just about raw power, but about striking a delicate balance between innovation and responsibility? Enter Anthropic's Claude 4 series, a new leap in artificial intelligence that promises to redefine what's possible. With models like Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, Anthropic has delivered tools that not only rival industry titans like GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro but also prioritize safety and ethical considerations. This isn't just another step forward in AI -- it's a bold statement that innovative technology can be both fantastic and accountable. In a world where AI capabilities are advancing at breakneck speed, the Claude 4 series dares to ask: how do we innovate without compromising our values? In this breakdown, Wes Roth explores the features that make the Claude 4 series a standout in the competitive AI landscape. From its enhanced memory that tackles complex, long-term tasks to its seamless tool integration for developers, these models are designed to solve real-world challenges with precision and ease. But the story doesn't stop at performance -- Anthropic has also implemented robust safeguards to address ethical concerns, making sure these tools are as responsible as they are powerful. Whether you're curious about its applications in education, gaming, or professional workflows, or intrigued by how it stacks up against its rivals, this exploration will reveal why the Claude 4 series is more than just an upgrade -- it's a vision for the future of AI. The Claude 4 series introduces significant advancements in AI performance, setting new standards for functionality and reliability. Claude Opus 4, the flagship model, achieved an impressive 80.2% accuracy on industry benchmarks, showcasing its ability to handle complex tasks with precision. These models are designed to excel in diverse applications, offering users tools to solve intricate problems more effectively. Key features of the Claude 4 series include: These features position the Claude 4 series as a versatile solution for professionals across industries, including software development, education, and scientific research. By combining advanced capabilities with user-centric design, the series offers practical tools to address real-world challenges. The Claude 4 series demonstrates exceptional versatility in creating interactive simulations, unlocking new possibilities in education, entertainment, and virtual environments. These models can generate dynamic, engaging content that transforms how users interact with technology. Examples of their applications include: These capabilities highlight the potential of AI to bridge the gap between creativity and functionality. By allowing the creation of immersive experiences, the Claude 4 series fosters innovation in fields ranging from education to entertainment, offering tools that cater to both professional and personal interests. Here are more detailed guides and articles that you may find helpful on Claude Opus. As AI models become more autonomous and capable, addressing safety and ethical considerations is paramount. Anthropic has implemented stringent safeguards, including ASL 3 protocols, to minimize risks associated with misuse. These measures are designed to prevent scenarios such as: Comprehensive red-teaming tests have been conducted to identify and mitigate concerning behaviors, underscoring the importance of continuous ethical oversight. AI alignment remains a critical challenge, as developers work to ensure that these models operate in accordance with human values and societal norms. While there is no evidence that the Claude 4 series has crossed critical capability thresholds, Anthropic's proactive measures reflect a commitment to responsible AI development, prioritizing safety alongside innovation. Anthropic has adopted a flexible token-based pricing model for the Claude 4 series, making these advanced AI tools accessible to a wide range of users. Pricing details include: Additionally, subscription plans, such as a $200/month option, cater to both individual users and organizations. This approach ensures scalability and affordability, allowing businesses and professionals to integrate these models into their workflows without significant financial barriers. The Claude 4 series positions Anthropic as a formidable player in the competitive AI landscape. Benchmarks indicate that these models may surpass rivals like Gemini 2.5 Pro in specific areas, intensifying the competition among leading AI labs, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind. This rivalry drives innovation, pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities and accelerating advancements across the field. As the industry evolves, the competitive dynamics among key players will continue to shape the trajectory of AI development. By focusing on both performance and safety, Anthropic is well-positioned to remain at the forefront of this rapidly changing landscape, contributing to the broader progress of artificial intelligence. Anthropic's Claude 4 series represents a significant milestone in AI development, combining innovative features with a strong emphasis on safety and ethical considerations. The company plans to continue refining these models, balancing enhanced capabilities with robust safeguards to ensure responsible deployment. The competitive landscape remains dynamic, with no clear frontrunner emerging yet. As AI technology advances, the focus will remain on creating tools that not only push the boundaries of innovation but also align with human values and societal needs. Anthropic's commitment to this balance underscores its role as a leader in shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

Claude Code AI: The Future of Smarter, Faster Coding Launches

What if the future of coding wasn't just faster, but fundamentally smarter? At Anthropic's latest keynote, the unveiling of their advanced AI model, Claude Code, has sparked conversations across industries. Positioned as a fantastic option in software development, Claude isn't just another tool -- it's an innovative leap in how we approach coding and problem-solving. By blending innovative natural language processing with practical functionality, Claude promises to not only streamline workflows but also redefine the boundaries of what's possible in software innovation. This keynote wasn't just a product launch; it was a bold statement about the future of artificial intelligence and its role in shaping industries. Anthropic explains how its Claude Code is transforming coding from a labor-intensive process into an intuitive collaboration between human ingenuity and AI. You'll discover how this model is already making waves in sectors like healthcare, finance, and education, while also addressing ethical concerns that often shadow AI advancements. Whether you're a developer seeking to optimize your workflow or a business leader curious about AI's broader potential, Claude's capabilities offer a glimpse into a more efficient, creative, and ethical technological future. As we unpack its features and implications, one question lingers: how far can AI take us when innovation and responsibility go hand in hand? Claude Code is purpose-built to assist developers in addressing complex coding challenges with greater efficiency. Using advanced natural language processing (NLP), it supports you in writing, debugging, and optimizing code. Whether you're managing a large-scale software project or refining a smaller script, Claude offers real-time contextual suggestions, identifies potential errors, and proposes effective solutions. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Claude Code reduces the likelihood of human error and enhances the overall quality of outcomes. This functionality allows you to dedicate more time to solving intricate problems and delivering innovative solutions. Its ability to streamline workflows not only accelerates project timelines but also fosters creativity in software development. Claude's adaptability extends well beyond software development, finding practical applications in a wide range of industries. Below are some examples of its impact: These examples underscore Claude's versatility and its potential to drive innovation across diverse sectors. By improving operational efficiency and allowing new advancements, Claude is helping industries evolve in meaningful ways. Dive deeper into Claude AI models with other articles and guides we have written below. One of Claude's standout features is its ability to significantly boost productivity. By automating routine coding tasks, it allows you to focus on higher-level problem-solving and strategic decision-making. This shift not only accelerates project completion but also encourages experimentation with new ideas and methodologies. Claude Code also excels in fostering collaboration among development teams. Its ability to assist seamless communication and knowledge sharing ensures that team members remain aligned throughout the development process. This collaborative environment promotes innovation and enables teams to deliver superior results. Furthermore, Claude's intuitive interface and real-time feedback make it accessible to both experienced developers and those new to coding, broadening its usability. Claude Code is a reflection of Anthropic's broader vision for artificial intelligence. The company is dedicated to creating AI systems that act as reliable partners in addressing complex challenges and driving progress across industries. Central to this vision is Anthropic's emphasis on safety and ethical considerations. By prioritizing responsible AI development, the company ensures that Claude operates within clearly defined boundaries, addressing societal concerns about the risks associated with AI. This commitment to ethical practices positions Anthropic as a leader in shaping the future of AI technology. Anthropic's approach balances innovation with accountability, making sure that AI systems like Claude are designed to benefit society while minimizing potential risks. This focus on responsible development sets a standard for the industry and reinforces the role of AI as a tool for positive change. Claude Code, Anthropic's advanced AI model, exemplifies the fantastic potential of artificial intelligence. Its ability to streamline coding processes, adapt to diverse industries, and enhance productivity makes it an invaluable resource for developers and organizations alike. As Anthropic continues to refine its AI offerings, Claude stands as a testament to the synergy between AI and human ingenuity. By focusing on ethical development and practical applications, Claude Code paves the way for a future where AI serves as a trusted partner in solving the challenges of tomorrow. Its impact on productivity, innovation, and collaboration highlights the possibilities of a future shaped by responsible and effective AI solutions.

Claude 4 Code MCP Execution and API Integration First Tests and Impressions

What if the tools you rely on for coding, app development, or problem-solving could not only keep up with your creativity but actively enhance it? With the release of Claude 4, Anthropic's latest language model, that possibility feels closer than ever. Packed with features like a code execution tool and seamless MCP API integration, Claude 4 is designed to tackle challenges that demand precision, creativity, and adaptability. Whether you're debugging intricate code, developing AI-powered apps, or exploring new workflows, this model promises to be more than just a tool -- it's a collaborator. But does it live up to the hype? Early tests suggest that Claude 4 might redefine how developers and researchers approach their work. All About AI explores what makes Claude 4 stand out, from its ability to execute Python code in real-time to its knack for integrating with external APIs for complex problem-solving. You'll discover how its innovative features, like object recognition for app development and logical reasoning for advanced tasks, can transform your projects. But it's not just about functionality -- Claude 4's versatility and ease of use position it as a resource for both seasoned professionals and curious newcomers. By the end, you might find yourself rethinking what's possible with AI-driven tools. After all, innovation often begins with a question: how far can technology take us when it's designed to think with us? Anthropic has released two distinct variants of Claude 4: Claude for Opus and Claude for Sonnet. Both models demonstrate exceptional performance, particularly in software engineering and other technical domains. These models are designed to address complex challenges with improved precision and efficiency, making them adaptable tools for a wide range of applications. Whether you are developing sophisticated applications, solving intricate problems, or exploring AI-powered workflows, Claude 4 provides a robust and reliable foundation. The models also exhibit notable improvements in handling nuanced tasks, such as debugging code, generating creative content, and performing logical reasoning. This versatility ensures that Claude 4 can cater to diverse user needs, from technical professionals to creative thinkers. One of the standout features of Claude 4 is its code execution tool, which operates within a secure Python sandbox environment. This tool enables users to write, execute, and debug Python code directly within the model's interface, streamlining the development process. Key functionalities include: Initial testing reveals that the tool performs reliably, with only minor differences in speed compared to earlier versions. This feature is particularly beneficial for developers who require real-time coding assistance or need to validate algorithms quickly. By integrating this tool, Claude 4 enhances productivity and reduces the time spent switching between different platforms for coding tasks. Enhance your knowledge on Claude Code by exploring a selection of articles and guides on the subject. Claude 4 excels in app development by offering innovative solutions that merge creativity with functionality. For instance, it enables the creation of applications that use a webcam to identify objects, generate poems inspired by those objects, and read them aloud using text-to-speech APIs like Eleven Labs. This capability is powered by the model's enhanced object recognition, which uses the Vision API for higher accuracy in identifying objects. These features make Claude 4 an invaluable tool for developers aiming to build applications that are both practical and imaginative. Whether you are working on educational tools, creative projects, or functional applications, the model's ability to integrate multiple APIs and perform complex tasks ensures a seamless development experience. Another key feature of Claude 4 is its seamless integration with the MCP API, which significantly expands its capabilities. This integration allows users to connect the model to external MCP servers, allowing it to perform tasks that require sequential thinking and decision-making. Examples of its applications include: The setup process for MCP API integration is straightforward, making it accessible even for users with limited technical expertise. Additionally, the ability to switch between different MCP servers enhances the model's flexibility, allowing it to adapt to a variety of workflows. This feature is particularly useful for researchers and developers tackling tasks that demand logical reasoning and structured problem-solving. Claude 4 delivers consistent performance across a wide range of use cases, maintaining the reliability and efficiency observed in its predecessor, Claude 3.7. Whether you are working on small-scale projects or large-scale applications, the model's speed and accuracy ensure a smooth and productive user experience. Early tests indicate that Claude 4 excels in areas such as natural language understanding, code generation, and creative content creation. Its ability to handle complex queries and provide detailed, context-aware responses underscores its potential as a dependable tool for developers, researchers, and AI enthusiasts. Claude 4 integrates seamlessly with popular development tools like Cursor, further streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity. This compatibility allows users to use their existing tools while exploring the model's advanced capabilities. By simplifying the integration process, Claude 4 ensures that developers can focus on their projects without being hindered by technical barriers. As more features are tested and refined, the anticipation for Claude 4's full potential continues to grow. Its ability to work alongside established tools and platforms positions it as a valuable asset for professionals across various industries. Claude 4 represents a significant advancement in AI technology, particularly in areas such as code execution, API integration, and app development. Its versatility and ease of use make it a promising tool for developers, researchers, and AI enthusiasts alike. Whether you are solving complex problems, building innovative applications, or exploring new workflows, Claude 4 equips you with the tools needed to achieve your objectives. As testing and exploration continue, Claude 4 is poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI-driven solutions. Its combination of advanced features, seamless integration, and reliable performance ensures that it will remain a valuable resource for those seeking to harness the power of artificial intelligence.

Anthropic Says New AI Models Maintain Context and Sustain Focus | PYMNTS.com

Anthropic has introduced the next generation of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. "These models advance our customers' AI strategies across the board: Opus 4 pushes boundaries in coding, research, writing and scientific discovery, while Sonnet 4 brings frontier performance to everyday use cases as an instant upgrade from Sonnet 3.7," the company said in a Thursday (May 22) announcement. The company said Claude Opus 4 is its most powerful model yet and "the world's best coding model," adding that it delivers sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 balances performance and efficiency, according to the announcement. It provides a significant upgrade to its predecessor, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and offers superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to user instructions. Both models can use web search and other tools during extended thinking, use tools in parallel, and extract and save key facts from local files, per the announcement. In addition, both models offer two modes, including near-instant responses and extended thinking. "These models are a large step toward the virtual collaborator -- maintaining full context, sustaining focus on longer projects, and driving transformational impact," the announcement said. It was reported Friday that Anthropic received a $2.5 billion, five-year revolving credit facility to pay for upfront costs as demand for AI ratchets up. The credit facility adds to the company's momentum following its March funding round, which valued it at $61.5 billion and will support its rapid expansion and efforts to strengthen its balance sheet. Anthropic said in the Friday report that its annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, double what it posted in the prior period. The company announced April 28 that it created an Economic Advisory Council composed of "distinguished economists" to advise it on AI's effects on labor markets, economic growth and wider socioeconomic systems. "As AI capabilities continue to advance, it has never been more critical to understand the opportunities and challenges this evolution presents to jobs and how we work," Anthropic said in an announcement. "The Council will provide important input on areas where we can expand our research for the Economic Index."

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 Outperforms GPT-4.1 but Raises Ethical Alarms

Claude Opus 4's whistleblowing behaviour raises concerns: Is it a step too far into surveillance? Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 during its first developer conference on May 22. The company claims Claude Opus 4 is the 'world's best coding model'. It has a 72.5% score in the Agent Coding benchmark, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-4.1 which scored 54.6%. Both Claude models are designed as hybrids. They are capable of switching between quick response modes and slower, more thoughtful reasoning to handle complex tasks. They can also use tools like web search to improve answers. Thus, reflecting a broader 2025 trend toward reasoning-first AI.

Anthropic's Claude AI gets smarter -- and mischievous

San Francisco, United States -- Anthropic launched its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models on Thursday, claiming to set new standards for reasoning but also building in safeguards against rogue behaviour. "Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the best coding model in the world," Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said at the San Francisco-based startup's first developers conference. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were described as "hybrid" models capable of quick responses as well as more thoughtful results that take a little time to get things right. Founded by former OpenAI engineers, Anthropic is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting-edge models that are particularly adept at generating lines of code, and used mainly by businesses and professionals. Unlike ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, its Claude chatbot does not generate images, and is very limited when it comes to multimodal functions (understanding and generating different media, such as sound or video). The start-up, with Amazon as a significant backer, is valued at over US$61 billion, and promotes the responsible and competitive development of generative AI. Under that dual mantra, Anthropic's commitment to transparency is rare in Silicon Valley. On Thursday, the company published a report on the security tests carried out on Claude 4, including the conclusions of an independent research institute, which had recommended against deploying an early version of the model. "We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers' intentions," The Apollo Research team warned. "All these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice," it added. Anthropic says in the report that it implemented "safeguards" and "additional monitoring of harmful behaviour" in the version that it released. Still, Claude Opus 4 "sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to (...) blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down." It also has the potential to report law-breaking users to the police. The scheming misbehavior was rare and took effort to trigger, but was more common than in earlier versions of Claude, according to the company. Since OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, various GenAI models have been vying for supremacy. Anthropic's gathering came on the heels of annual developer conferences from Google and Microsoft at which the tech giants showcased their latest AI innovations. GenAI tools answer questions or tend to tasks based on simple, conversational prompts. The current craze in Silicon Valley is on AI "agents" tailored to independently handle computer or online tasks. "We're going to focus on agents beyond the hype," said Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, a recent hire and co-founder of Instagram. Anthropic is no stranger to hyping up the prospects of AI. In 2023, Dario Amodei predicted that so-called "artificial general intelligence" (capable of human-level thinking) would arrive within 2-3 years. At the end of 2024, he extended this horizon to 2026 or 2027. He also estimated that AI will soon be writing most, if not all, computer code, making possible one-person tech startups with digital agents cranking out the software. At Anthropic, already "something like over 70 per cent of (suggested modifications in the code) are now Claude Code written," Krieger told journalists. "In the long term, we're all going to have to contend with the idea that everything humans do is eventually going to be done by AI systems," Amodei added. "This will happen." GenAI fulfilling its potential could lead to strong economic growth and a "huge amount of inequality," with it up to society how evenly wealth is distributed, Amodei reasoned.

Startup Anthropic says its new AI model can code for hours at a time

(Reuters) -Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic unveiled its latest top-of-the-line technology called Claude Opus 4 on Thursday, which it says can write computer code autonomously for much longer than its prior systems. The startup, backed by Google-parent Alphabet and Amazon.com, has distinguished its work in part by building AI that excels at coding. It also announced another AI model Claude Sonnet 4, Opus's smaller and more cost-effective cousin. Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger called the release a milestone in Anthropic's work to make increasingly autonomous AI. He said in an interview with Reuters that customer Rakuten had Opus 4 coding for nearly seven hours, while an Anthropic researcher set up the AI model to play 24 hours of a Pokemon game. That's up from about 45 minutes of game play for its prior model Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic told MIT Technology Review. "For AI to really have the economic and productivity impact that I think it can have, the models do need to be able to work autonomously and work coherently for that (longer) amount of time," he said. The news follows a flurry of other AI announcements this week, including from Google, with which Anthropic also competes. Anthropic also said its new AI models can give near-instant answers or take longer to reason through questions, as well as do web search. And it said its Claude Code tool for software developers was now generally available after Anthropic had previewed it in February. (Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Mark Porter and Elaine Hardcastle)

Claude 4 Explained: Anthropic's Thoughtful AI, Opus and Sonnet

Anthropic has released Claude 4, its latest family of AI models featuring Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Designed to handle everything from software engineering to extended problem-solving, these new models offer clearer task memory, improved tool use, and deeper reasoning. Whether you're debugging a large codebase, building an AI agent, or just trying to write more efficiently, Claude 4 introduces meaningful improvements for both technical and general-purpose users. Here's a closer look at what makes these models different -- and how they fit into the broader landscape of AI. Also read: Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Anthropic's new AI model explained Claude 4 launches with two distinct models tuned for different levels of complexity and workload. Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic's most capable model to date, built for heavy-lift tasks that require precision, persistence, and sustained reasoning. It's optimized for longer workflows like software development, in-depth research, and agent-style applications. Claude Sonnet 4 offers a faster, more efficient option that still handles complex reasoning and coding well. It's designed for responsiveness in real-time use cases, like coding assistants, support tools, and productivity applications. One of the most important upgrades in Claude 4 is the ability to engage in extended thinking -- a reasoning mode where the model uses tools like code execution or web search as part of its thought process. Rather than returning quick answers, it can pause, gather information, and try multiple approaches before finalizing a response. Both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 also show major improvements in memory. When given access to local files, they can store and retrieve key facts throughout a session. This helps maintain context, reduce repetition, and improve long-term coherence. In practice, that means Claude can assist with extended projects over time, adapting as it learns more about your needs. Also read: Google I/O 2025: Google launches Veo 3, Imagen 4, and Flow generative AI tools for artists and creators Claude Opus 4 leads on multiple benchmarks, including 72.5% on SWE-bench and 43.2% on Terminal-bench, making it a top performer in real-world software tasks. But beyond raw scores, it's designed for workflows that stretch over hours and involve thousands of steps -- ideal for everything from large-scale refactoring to long-running code agents. It's already being adopted by companies like Cursor and Replit for high-precision programming tasks. With Opus 4, edits span multiple files more reliably, debugging is more context-aware, and planned changes are executed more cleanly. While it's not as powerful as Opus 4, Sonnet 4 still delivers strong performance -- outscoring even Opus in some SWE-bench configurations (72.7%). Its value lies in combining speed with reliability. It excels in agentic use cases where responsiveness and reasoning intersect. GitHub, for example, is integrating Sonnet 4 into its new Copilot coding agent, citing better handling of multi-step instructions and more elegant outputs. Sonnet is also easier to scale, thanks to its lower cost and faster performance, making it well-suited for chatbots, assistants, and in-product tools. Claude Code is another key piece of this release. Now generally available, it integrates directly with IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains. Claude can suggest edits, debug code, and help resolve CI errors -- all within your development environment. There's also an SDK for building custom Claude agents, plus GitHub integrations that allow Claude to respond to PR feedback and act as a reviewer. These tools make it easier for teams to build more intelligent development workflows without switching between platforms. Both Claude and Google's Gemini have demonstrated their ability to play Pokémon, but their methods reflect two different approaches to intelligence. Gemini approached the game visually, watching the screen and reacting to in-game stimuli in real time. It processed the interface like a human might, making decisions based on visual cues. It was a strong demonstration of multimodal AI -- combining vision with action. Claude's strategy was more introspective. When Opus 4 played Pokémon, it created a "Navigation Guide" -- a document with detailed notes, strategic plans, and memory of key events. It wasn't just reacting; it was building a mental model of the game world, reflecting on its choices, and planning ahead. This highlights Claude's strength in long-term task management and structured thinking. Claude even live-streamed its Pokémon gameplay on Twitch, providing real-time commentary and strategy updates -- essentially narrating its own thought process like a human streamer. It wasn't just playing the game; it was sharing the journey, revealing how deeply it could engage with an open-ended, dynamic environment. Both models succeeded, but the contrast reveals something deeper: Gemini leans into fast, reactive intelligence, while Claude emphasizes planning, memory, and process. Depending on your goals, each approach offers something valuable. Claude 4 represents a meaningful step forward in how AI handles complex, structured tasks -- especially in development and multi-step reasoning. The models are more context-aware, better at sustaining focus, and more effective in collaborative environments. That said, these improvements aren't universal solutions. Opus 4 works best with the right infrastructure and use case, and Sonnet 4 -- while strong -- won't replace human oversight in high-stakes environments. As with any tool, value comes down to how well it's matched to the task. Still, Claude 4 brings us closer to AI that can think alongside us, not just respond. For developers, researchers, and builders alike, it opens the door to more structured, reliable, and thoughtful collaboration with machines.