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Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#541

Post by scuderiaseb »

northern-lights wrote: post #23

> Not only that, but we plan to release a new class of model with even higher intelligence than Opus. As part of Project Glasswing, a small number of organizations are currently using Claude Mythos Preview for cybersecurity work. Models of this capability level require stronger cyber safeguards before they can be generally released. We’re making swift progress on developing these safeguards and expect to be able to b…

So this is how they’ll remove access from Claude Pro to the biggest models. You would need at least a Claude Max subscription for the bigger than Opus models I bet.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#542

Post by esafak »

skerit wrote: post #197
clutch89 wrote: post #6

> One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty Anthropic talks about their own models as if they're discovering new species in the wild...

I noticed (and absolutely HATE) that Opus 4.7 likes to start any negative response with "I have to be honest" or whatever. It drives me mad.

Not gonna lie! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csYC6O_kH-s

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#543

Post by alfalfasprout »

gen220 wrote: post #135
NiloCK wrote: post #77

A rambling comment: I think this is the first time we've had a third minor version bump on a frontier Anthropic model. (I count the 0.5s as major here, because they've been issued non-sequentially and also corresponded to massive capability leaps, eg, Sonnet 3.5, Opus 4.5). So now the Opus 4.5 family has successors 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8, each posting fairly modest claimed gains. My own experience w/ 4.6 and 4.7 are that…

I'm curious to poll HN on this issue. Do you feel like we've had meaningful/noticeable gains in terms of your programming workflows between 4.5 and 4.7? My 2¢, I personally feel like all of the productivity gains since 4.5's release (in November 2025!!) have come from improvements to the harnesses (cc, cursor cli, codex, opencode, whatever) AND from the context window expansion from 200k to 1M. But the actual "raw" i…

I'm actually currently studying this :)

Honestly... not that dramatically. Each release is much more marginal. And quoted official benchmarks doesn't translate very well into the real world.

4.7 regressed hard in some ways. But a compounding factor too is that the claude code harness seems to nerf the model after a few months. Probably to reduce token use.

So far 4.8 seems less verbose but we'll see in practice what it translates into meaningfully.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#545

Post by andai »

827a wrote: post #394

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 Fl…

Tried using everything that isn't Claude and I keep switching back to Claude because even the smarter models give me uglier code, or miss common sense requirements. (And the dumber models give me code that doesn't work properly).

I keep trying to switch to something else but I keep coming back. (Typically after a few days of giving a new model an honest go, and finding myself constantly asking Sonnet to fix its output... Yes, even Sonnet wins on this front! They really do have some kind of special sauce.)

I'm not where most of their money comes from though, and I don't know how universal my experience is.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#546

Post by gck1 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #306
siwakotisaurav wrote: post #100

Was about to split my $200 max plan into $100 Claude and $100 codex, let’s see if I still need to

That's just throwing away money, $100 Codex will go back to 5x from 10x on May 31

Even if so (granted, if the mysterious "x" isn't also adjusted), I bet codex usage limits on $100 plan would still be more generous than Anthropic's $200.

I never even gotten close to token anxiety on codex $200 and it's essentially working 24/7. This was never possible with Anthropic since Opus came out.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#547

Post by kakugawa »

gibspaulding wrote: post #488
colonCapitalDee wrote: post #32

"Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor." This is a refreshing attitude! I've also verified that you can now turn off adaptive thinking in the web UI, which is great. I've had a lot of problems with thinking not triggering and the model producing sub-par output. Glad we can finally turn it off. (I hope being able to turn off adaptive thinking is new, if I could have turned…

I’m pretty sure that switch has always been there, but turning it off doesn’t do what you want. It disables thinking entirely.

Opus 4.7 does not support disabling adaptive thinking (web, Claude Code). [1] Like the OP, I experienced similar issues and I'm glad that they brought back the ability to disable adaptive thinking in Opus 4.8.

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config#adaptive-reason...

> Opus 4.7 and later always use adaptive reasoning. The fixed thinking budget mode and `CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING` do not apply to them.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#548

Post by eminence32 »

simonw wrote: post #73

I generated pelicans riding bicycles on both thinking level low and thinking level high: https://gist.github.com/simonw/68560eddb0b268a8417f80ceb7304... The high one is notably better - the bicycle frame is the correct shape, unlike thinking level low. For comparison, here's Opus 4.7: https://gist.github.com/simonw/afcb19addf3f38eb1996e1ebe749c...

I bet someone shares this link every time you post about bicycles, but since I didn't see anyone share it yet in this thread, I'll take the opportunity to do so:

https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/

Turns out even humans can be pretty bad at drawing bicycles :)

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#549

Post by dbgrman »

827a wrote: post #394

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 Fl…

thats a pretty cynical take. > past the point of human ability to discern whether they are actually better or worse

This is lack of imagination. If you use these models heavily enough, pretty soon you'll hit the edges of their capabilities. The smarter among us are collecting these problems into a personal benchmark and use that to judge model capability. I think this is the right approach, and dare I say, even better than generic benchmarks. To me, it matters less what the benchmark says, and more what my particular problems are.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#550

Post by iknowstuff »

mrandish wrote: post #521
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be surprised if the next gen frontier models are the last. There's orders of magnitude of low hanging juice to squeeze out of smaller models. It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks within 2-3 years (design not certain, probably unlikely). It is far less clear that a 1.2T model will be meaningfully better enough to justify training it. As far as reasoning is con…

> Google, OpenAI, Anthropic could train a 30B GRAM-based model in days - and it could potentially have better local reasoning than the best model available today at >1T param I agree but with their urgent IPO-driven need to keep increasing prices, the frontier vendors now have every incentive maintain the perception that frontier performance requires endless >$200K racks of unobtanium GPUs and RAM. While they'd love…

Google seems pretty happy to release smaller, faster models. 3.5 Flash is pretty clutch isn't it?
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