After whirlwind week of bulletins from Google and OpenAI, Anthropic has its personal information to share.
On Thursday, Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, its subsequent technology of fashions, with an emphasis on coding, reasoning, and agentic capabilities. Based on Rakuten, which acquired early entry to the mannequin, Claude Opus 4 ran “independently for seven hours with sustained performance.”
Claude Opus is Anthropic’s largest model of the mannequin household with extra energy for longer, complicated duties, whereas Sonnet is mostly speedier and extra environment friendly. Claude Opus 4 is a step up from its earlier model, Opus 3, and Sonnet 4 replaces Sonnet 3.7.
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Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 outperform rivals like OpenAI’s o3 and Gemini 2.5 Professional on key benchmarks for agentic coding duties like SWE-bench and Terminal-bench. It is value noting nevertheless, that self-reported benchmarks aren’t thought-about the perfect markers of efficiency since these evaluations do not at all times translate to real-world use circumstances, plus AI labs aren’t into the entire transparency factor today, which AI researchers and coverage makers more and more name for. “AI benchmarks need to be subjected to the same demands concerning transparency, fairness, and explainability, as algorithmic systems and AI models writ large,” mentioned the European Fee’s Joint Analysis Heart.
Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 outperform rivals in SWE-bench, however take benchmark efficiency with a grain of salt.
Credit score: Anthropic
Alongside the launch of Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, Anthropic additionally launched new options. That features net search whereas Claude is in prolonged considering mode, and summaries of Claude’s reasoning log “instead of Claude’s raw thought process.” That is described within the weblog publish as being extra useful to customers, but in addition “protecting [its] competitive advantage,” i.e. not revealing the components of its secret sauce. Anthropic additionally introduced improved reminiscence and gear use in parallel with different operations, basic availability of its agentic coding software Claude Code, and extra instruments for the Claude API.
Within the security and alignment realm, Anthropic mentioned each fashions are “65 percent less likely to engage in reward hacking than Claude Sonnet 3.7.” Reward hacking is a barely terrifying phenomenon the place fashions can basically cheat and misinform earn a reward (efficiently carry out a process).
The most effective indicators we have now in evaluating a mannequin’s efficiency is customers’ personal expertise with it, though much more subjective than benchmarks. However we’ll quickly learn how Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 chalk as much as rivals in that regard.
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