On Thursday, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, marking the corporate’s return to bigger mannequin releases after primarily specializing in mid-range Sonnet variants since June of final 12 months. The brand new fashions characterize what the corporate calls its most succesful coding fashions but, with Opus 4 designed for complicated, long-running duties that may function autonomously for hours.
Alex Albert, Anthropic’s head of Claude Relations, advised Ars Technica that the corporate selected to revive the Opus line due to rising demand for agentic AI purposes. “Throughout all the businesses on the market which are constructing issues, there is a actually massive wave of those agentic purposes arising, and a really excessive demand and premium being positioned on intelligence,” Albert stated. “I feel Opus goes to suit that groove completely.”
Earlier than we go additional, a quick refresher on Claude’s three AI mannequin “dimension” names (introduced in March 2024) might be warranted. Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus provide a tradeoff between value (within the API), pace, and functionality.
Haiku fashions are the smallest, least costly to run, and least succesful by way of what you may name “context depth” (contemplating conceptual relationships within the immediate) and encoded data. Owing to the small dimension in parameter depend, Haiku fashions retain fewer concrete information and thus are inclined to confabulate extra regularly (plausibly answering questions based mostly on lack of information) than bigger fashions, however they’re much sooner at fundamental duties than bigger fashions. Sonnet is historically a mid-range mannequin that hits a stability between price and functionality, and Opus fashions have at all times been the most important and slowest to run. Nonetheless, Opus fashions course of context extra deeply and are hypothetically higher fitted to operating deep logical duties.
A screenshot of the Claude net interface with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 choices proven.
Credit score:
Anthropic
There isn’t a Claude 4 Haiku simply but, however the brand new Sonnet and Opus fashions can reportedly deal with duties that earlier variations couldn’t. In our interview with Albert, he described testing situations the place Opus 4 labored coherently for as much as 24 hours on duties like playing Pokémon whereas coding refactoring duties in Claude Code ran for seven hours with out interruption. Earlier Claude fashions usually lasted just one to 2 hours earlier than dropping coherence, Albert stated, which means that the fashions may solely produce helpful self-referencing outputs for that lengthy earlier than starting to output too many errors.
