Not surprisingly, Anthropic finally announced its Opus 4.8 model. It is a very strong agentic model that tops the charts across the board other than agentic terminal coding. It is more “honest” than previous models, which means it will flag uncertainties about its work and won’t wake as many unsupported claims. It also has lower misaligned behavior than Opus 4.7 and Sonnet 4.6. The price remains the same. The fast mode for Opus 4.8 is now 3 times cheaper than previous models.
This model has an additional mode called ultracode, which combines xhigh effort level with Claude Code to launch multi-agent workflows. With dynamic workflows, Claude can run hundreds of subagents in a single session. You can also update Claude’s instructions mid-task. As Anthropic explains:
“Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor.”
Not surprisingly, Anthropic is planning to release new class of model with smarter intelligence than Opus (Mythos?). It is also working to reduce costs for models. The cost remains $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
