A new era for intelligent agents and AI coding

Anthropic has unveiled its latest Claude 4 model family, and it’s looking like a leap for anyone building next-gen AI assistants or coding. The stars of the show are Claude Opus 4, the new powerhouse, and Claude Sonnet 4, designed to be a smart all-rounder.

Anthropic isn’t shy about its ambitions, stating these models are geared to “advance our customers’ AI strategies across the board.” They’re positioning Opus 4 as the tool to “push boundaries in coding, research, writing, and scientific discovery,” while Sonnet 4 is billed as an “instant upgrade from Sonnet 3.7,” ready to bring “frontier performance to everyday use cases.”

Claude Opus 4: The new coding champ

When Anthropic calls Claude Opus 4 its “most powerful model yet and the best coding model in the world,” you sit up and take notice. And they’ve got the numbers to back it up, with Opus 4 topping the charts on crucial industry tests, hitting 72.5% on SWE-bench and 43.2% on Terminal-bench.

But it’s not just about quick sprints. Opus 4 is built for the long haul, designed for “sustained performance on long-running tasks that require focused effort and thousands of steps.” Imagine an AI that can “work continuously for several hours”—that’s what Anthropic claims.

This should be a massive step up from previous Sonnet models and could expand what AI agents can achieve, tackling problems that require real persistence.

Claude Sonnet 4: For daily AI and agentic work

While Opus 4 is the heavyweight champion, Claude Sonnet 4 is shaping up to be the versatile workhorse, promising a significant boost for a huge range of applications. Early feedback from those who’ve had a sneak peek is glowing.

For instance, GitHub “says Claude Sonnet 4 soars in agentic scenarios” and is so impressed they “plan to introduce it as the base model for the new coding agent in GitHub Copilot.” That’s a hefty endorsement. 

Tech commentator Manus is also impressed, highlighting its “improvements in following complex instructions, clear reasoning, and aesthetic outputs.”

The positive vibes continue with iGent, which “reports Sonnet 4 excels at autonomous multi-feature app development, as well as substantially improved problem-solving and codebase navigation—reducing navigation errors from 20% to near zero.” That’s a game-changer for development workflows. 

Sourcegraph is equally optimistic, seeing the model as a “substantial leap in software development—staying on track longer, understanding problems more deeply, and providing more elegant code quality.”

Augment Code has seen “higher success rates, more surgical code edits, and more careful work through complex tasks,” leading them to make Sonnet 4 their “top choice for their primary model.”

Hybrid modes and developer delights

One of the really clever bits about the Claude 4 family is its hybrid nature. Both Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 can operate in two gears: one for those near-instant replies we often need, and another that allows for “extended thinking for deeper reasoning.”

This deeper thinking mode is part of the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise Claude plans. Good news for everyone, though – Sonnet 4, complete with this extended thinking, will also be available to free users, which is a fantastic move for making top-tier AI more accessible.

Anthropic is also rolling out some tasty new tools for developers on its API, clearly aiming to supercharge the creation of more sophisticated AI agents:

• Code execution tool: This lets models actually run code, opening up all sorts of possibilities for interactive and problem-solving applications.
• MCP connector: Introduced by Anthropic, MCP standardises context exchange between AI assistants and software environments.
• Files API: This will make it much easier for AI to work directly with files, which is a big deal for many real-world tasks.
• Prompt caching: Developers will be able to cache prompts for up to an hour. This might sound small, but it can make a real difference to speed and efficiency, especially for frequently used queries.

Leading the pack in real-world performance

Anthropic is keen to emphasise that its “Claude 4 models lead on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark for performance on real software engineering tasks.” Beyond coding, they stress that these models “deliver strong performance across coding, reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and agentic tasks.”

Despite the leaps in capability, Anthropic is holding the line on pricing. Claude Opus 4 will set you back $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Claude Sonnet 4, the more accessible option, is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. This consistency will be welcomed by existing users.

Both Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are ready to go via the Anthropic API, and they’re also popping up on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. This broad availability means businesses and developers worldwide can start experimenting and integrating these new tools fairly easily.

Anthropic is clearly doubling down on making AI more capable, particularly in the complex realms of coding and autonomous agent behaviour. With these new models and developer tools, the potential for innovation just got a serious boost.

(Image credit: Anthropic)

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