Anthropic unveils Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, advancing autonomous AI capabilities and triggering new AI safety measures.
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, its most advanced AI models to date. The launch comes amid rapid industry growth, with the company’s annualised revenue reportedly doubling to $2 billion in the first quarter of 2025.
The Claude 4 models, backed by Amazon and developed by former OpenAI executives, feature improvements in coding, autonomous task execution, and reasoning.
Opus 4 leads in the SWE-bench coding benchmark at 72.5 percent, outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. Designed for extended task execution, it can maintain focus for up to seven hours, simulating a full workday.
Anthropic says both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 use hybrid reasoning systems. These allow near-instant responses alongside extended, tool-assisted tasks, including independent web searches, file analysis, and use of multiple tools simultaneously.
Claude models can also build ‘tacit knowledge’ from local file interactions, supporting continuity over time. Sonnet 4, a more efficient alternative to Opus, offers improved instruction following and is already integrated into GitHub’s next Copilot agent.
Both models support expanded developer tools and memory caching through Anthropic’s API, with direct integration into environments like VS Code and JetBrains.
Pricing for Claude Opus 4 is set at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Sonnet 4 is offered at lower rates of $3 and $15, respectively. Opus 4 is included in Claude’s Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise tiers, while Sonnet 4 is accessible to free users.
The release also includes Claude Code, a developer assistant capable of reviewing pull requests, resolving CI errors, and proposing code edits. New API features support GitHub integrations, execution tools, and file management.
Anthropic is positioning itself in direct competition with OpenAI, Google, and Meta. While other firms lead in general reasoning and multimodal performance, Anthropic’s strength lies in sustained coding and planning tasks.
However, the company also acknowledged new safety concerns. Claude Opus 4 has triggered Anthropic’s AI Safety Level 3 protocol, following internal findings that it could help users with limited expertise produce hazardous materials.
In response, more than 100 safety controls have been implemented, including real-time monitoring, restricted data egress, and a bug bounty program. Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are available via Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI.
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