Claude Opus 4.8 • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#551

Post by kdmtctl » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:33 PM UTC

TIPSIO wrote: post #234

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…

Seems like they might be hinting that if you are not a billionaire or multi-billion dollar company you will just get a limited and nerfed Claude Code slash command /mythos-security-audit or something. Hope this isn’t the case and that normal average Joe’s of the world don’t get policed out of access.

This command would be not so bad for not a billionaire me.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#552

Post by jsnell » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:33 PM UTC

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…

I'm a bit confused about what point you're trying to make.

Because you seem to be saying that Anthropic not changing the price of Opus is bad, but then two of your positive examples are Gemini 3.5 Flash (which tripled the 3.1 Flash token prices) and GPT-5.5 (which doubled the GPT-5.4 price, and is slightly more expensive per token than Opus).

Is your argument actually that price hikes are good? That doesn't seem to fit with the general tenor of the message.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#553

Post by gck1 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #183

> We have increased rate limits in Claude Code to accommodate the higher token usage of higher effort levels; users can select whichever makes sense for their particular project. They're only subsidizing more and more it seems

What's equally possible is that hardware availability cut into their profits starting January this year, which made them to reduce limits to such laughable levels that people switched to codex.

Anthropic is not losing money on subscriptions. It's just API rates are heavily inflated to make subscriptions seem like an amazing deal.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#554

Post by wrs » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

silverlight wrote: post #236

Unfortunately they seem to have straight up broken Claude Code either with this release in the backend or the new CC version. Errors about "can't modify thinking blocks" are bricking long-running sessions: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=is%3Aissu...

[flagged]

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#555

Post by BoorishBears » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC

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…

All signs point to Opus 4.7 being smaller than 4.6, so I'm not sure all this holds.

You realize gpt-5.5 is also double the price of gpt-5.4, which itself was a price increase too, right?

Labs are divorcing pricing from inference costs.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#556

Post by senko » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC

jryan49 wrote: post #514

senko wrote: post #385

My fav coding benchmark for frontier models is to build a simple RTS game in one file (js/html/css). Claude Code with Opus 4.8 in ultracode mode nailed it, the best result so far: https://bsky.app/profile/senko.net/post/3mmwnrkwboc2v The prompt was: Create a simple but functional real time strategy (RTS) game similar to old WarCraft, StarCraft or Command & Conquer games. The player should be able to build buildings,…

Kinda buggy, but impressively nonetheless. How long did it take?

It took 50 minutes, would be ~$20 in API costs (I'm on a Pro sub).

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#557

Post by imagetic » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:38 PM UTC

I used to think it was a big deal when a HN post had more than 500 comments.

Now it’s every day. Like billion dollar evaluations.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#558

Post by krupan » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:38 PM UTC

pbmango wrote: post #14

I can't help but think of Iphone updates since about 2018. The thinnest, fastest, longest battery life Iphone ever. It seems mostly the same and I probably won't be able to tell other than the name, but everyone buys it anyway. This is good psychology for the labs. When Buffett invested in Apple he loved citing how most people would rather give up their second car than their Iphone.

This in incredibly refreshing take, thank you. It's about time someone admitted that we aren't on the verge of Singularity with these LLMs. We've probably hit a local AI maxima here and it could be another 10 to 20 years before we am get another big break through.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#559

Post by senko » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

jclay wrote: post #424

senko wrote: post #385

My fav coding benchmark for frontier models is to build a simple RTS game in one file (js/html/css). Claude Code with Opus 4.8 in ultracode mode nailed it, the best result so far: https://bsky.app/profile/senko.net/post/3mmwnrkwboc2v The prompt was: Create a simple but functional real time strategy (RTS) game similar to old WarCraft, StarCraft or Command & Conquer games. The player should be able to build buildings,…

It almost appears as if the code was minified. The variable names are short and formatting looks like it's written to minimize whitespace. Did it write it in this compact format all on it's own?

Yeah looks extremely compact. I didn't instruct it or told it to use as few lines of code or characters or nothing of the sort.

Not sure why it did that. Its own rationale (which is highly suspect, but the only lead I have) is that it defaults to dense style if it has to write a file in a single go. May be a kernel of truth somewhere in there.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#560

Post by tanepiper » Thu, May 28, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

gAI wrote: post #115

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…

4.7 was the first time I had to resort to using the previous version (4.6) for most use cases. Hoping 4.8 rectifies this.

Yep, until 1st June 4.6 is still x1 on Copilot, but will jump up quite a bit in coat - 4.7 was already highly priced, and the output was frankly terrible.

It still seems trying to build general models is mostly cost prohibitive - the frontier model provider and resellers are repricing in such a way the return on investment is dropping as developers and users become more cautious of burning their limits.

I'm still of the opinion that models like 4.6 don't need to be improved on - rather they need to be better integrated with more domain specific models in agentic flows.