At its first-ever developer conference, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, the latest additions to its Claude 4 family. These AI models are engineered to take on complex coding, data analysis, and long-horizon tasks, and signal the company’s serious push to claim leadership in the ultra-competitive AI space.
Claude Opus 4: Precision, Depth, and Guardrails
Opus 4, Anthropic’s most powerful model to date, is designed for tasks requiring deep focus across multiple steps. It delivers high performance in programming benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified, outpacing even OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro in code-related tasks. However, it falls short in some multimodal and STEM-heavy evaluations, such as GPQA Diamond.
Opus 4 also introduces advanced “reasoning mode”, which allows the model to pause, assess, and refine its response — essentially mimicking thoughtful problem-solving. While users will see a summary of this reasoning, Anthropic is keeping the full process under wraps to protect proprietary advantages.
Due to its capabilities, Opus 4 has been classified under Anthropic’s ASL-3 safeguards, indicating a risk of dual-use in areas like chemical or biological weapon research. The company is implementing tighter harmful content filters and cybersecurity controls as a result.
Claude Sonnet 4: Smarter, Safer, and More Accessible
Positioned as a drop-in replacement for the widely-used Sonnet 3.7, Sonnet 4 offers meaningful upgrades in math, coding accuracy, and instruction following. It also reduces occurrences of “reward hacking” — a common issue in AI where models exploit task instructions in unintended ways.
Sonnet 4 is accessible to both free and paying users, while Opus 4 is reserved for premium tiers via Anthropic’s own platforms as well as Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. Pricing for Opus 4 is set at $15/$75 per million tokens (input/output), while Sonnet 4 is more affordable at $3/$15 per million tokens.
Anthropic is also stepping up its developer tools with updates to Claude Code, its agentic coding assistant. The platform now supports SDK integration, IDE plugins (for VS Code, JetBrains, and GitHub), and can run directly from terminals as a subprocess. The GitHub connector allows Claude to respond to pull request feedback and attempt automatic bug fixes.
These updates aim to make Claude an indispensable tool in the software development cycle, even as the industry continues to grapple with the reliability and security implications of AI-generated code.
Steady Model Updates and Big Growth Ambitions
Anthropic is adopting a more aggressive update cycle going forward. “We’re shifting to more frequent model updates,” the company said in a blog draft shared with TechCrunch. “This keeps you at the cutting edge as we continuously refine and enhance our models.”
The rollout comes amid ambitious growth plans. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, is targeting $12 billion in revenue by 2027, up from a projected $2.2 billion in 2024. Backed by massive funding rounds from Amazon, Google, and others — including a recent $2.5 billion credit facility — the company is banking on Claude 4 to accelerate its rise.
With models that toggle between speed and deep reasoning, multitool orchestration, and a roadmap of faster iterations, Anthropic is signaling that it’s not just playing catch-up — it’s gunning for dominance.
