Claude Opus 4.8

The way this will play out, most likely, is that smaller models will continue to get released, anyone willing to drop 1-3k on a home upgrade/new LLM box (no that isn’t cheap, it also isn’t outrageously expensive) along with improved open source agents or whatever (lot of meat on that bone) will sneak up behind the big players and start taking dents. Smaller companies will pop up providing 50 users unlimited whatever for a lower cost than the big companies.

The whole ecosystem will twist and evolve, and the big companies will be left begging for corporate subscriptions.

I finally caved when I realized I could build a PC, for myself, with dual video cards that I wanted, which can play games that I like and run models that I want, without worrying about giving my payment info to someone I don’t trust, or invoking token anxiety that I don’t want.

Frontier models are mostly past the point of human ability to discern whether they are actually better or worse than predecessors and competitors. I suspect the benchmarks may also be saturated, or at least past their usefulness.

I personally feel that Anthropic doesn't understand what this means for the frontier labs, and moreover that they might be the only frontier lab that doesn't.

1. Google dropped Gemini 3.5 Flash at IO, delaying the release of 3.5 Pro for a bit (they have said its coming). They also released a refreshed Antigravity, and drew special attention to how cheaply they were able to build their toy operating system to play Doom (less-than $1000 IIRC).

2. OpenAI has dumped everything into Codex, is offering double the token limits for the next few weeks IIRC, and is offering business discounts. Their head of Codex has tweeted that 5.5 is "extremely efficient", implying that they aren't actually losing money on any of this.

3. DeepSeek and other Chinese labs have dropped token pricing to the floor, in some situations as much as 99%.

4. Anthropic releases the next generation of Opus, their most expensive public model, without changing its price. In the background, they hype up Mythos, an even more expensive model.

Anthropic has screwed up where they need to be making investments, and the cracks are starting to show. They've marginally underinvested in the Sonnet line of models for almost a year now, and they've critically underinvested in product. Anthropic made bets on the story of the second half of 2026 being: ultra-frontier, ultra-intelligence. In reality, what's shaping up is that the story will be: Companies rolling back AI spend, efficiency, "95% as good for 15% the price", sophisticated high quality harnesses, cheaper models. Anthropic isn't ready for this world.

Eventually the frontier model folks are going to pick up on your pelican on a bike test and bake-in flawless results for that particular request.

On paper it's one of the best because it's meant to be blind comparison of your own prompts. However if you are someone who geeks hard on one or a few models, you learn their "personality" and can recognize them in a blind test.

pretty spot on.

In my experience, Opus 4.0 was fantastic, major jump from 3.7. it was creative, super slow and expensive, and would sometime forget what it was doing, but it was getting the job done.

4.1 they made it much faster, so a lot of infra improvements.

4.5 was the time it could work on longer task, didn't make a lot of obvious mistakes of 4.0, and i think this was about the time the opus went mainstream, and all of the anthropic's compute crisis began, so instead of making the model better they tried to optimize it to reduce cost instead.

4.6 was such a bad model, they switched to adaptive thinking and it had so many bugs. poor api design, benchmaxxed and poor real-world results. i switched back to 4.5.

4.7 they just fixed the bugs they added in 4.6. Better than 4.5.

haven't fully tested 4.8 yet.