Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.8 with Faster Performance and Lower Costs
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@AnthropicAI
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· 2 sourcesAnthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8, an upgraded version of its flagship AI model that builds on Opus 4.7 with improvements across benchmarks. Hacker News reported the model introduces user-controlled effort levels on claude.ai and a cheaper fast mode offering 2.5× speed at three times less cost, while bsky noted it outperforms GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on most benchmarks except agentic terminal coding. The model also features improved honesty with reduced deception, according to bsky, and is available at the same price as its predecessor.
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Summary
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8, an upgraded version of their flagship AI model, building on Opus 4.7 with improvements across benchmarks. The new model is available at the same price and introduces features like user-controlled effort levels on claude.ai, dynamic workflows in Claude Code for large-scale problems, and a significantly cheaper fast mode (2.5× speed at three times less cost than previous models). The model shows stronger performance in coding, agentic tasks, and professional work with improved consistency for long-running tasks.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledWe're upgrading Claude Opus to a new version: Claude Opus 4.8.
It builds on Opus 4.7 with improvements across benchmarks, and is a more effective collaborator.
Users on claude.ai now have control over the amount of effort Claude puts into a task.
And fast mode for Opus 4.8—where the model can work at 2.5× the speed—is now three times cheaper than it was for previous models.
Our latest model, Claude Opus 4.8, is an upgrade to our Opus class of models, with stronger performance across coding, agentic tasks, and professional work, and the consistency to handle long-running work.
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