Claude Opus 4.8
Anthropic · Released May 2026
Anthropic's flagship reasoning model and the practical frontier incumbent for deployable capability — 1M-token context at $5/$25 per 1M tokens, included across all subscription plans. Our pick for review-heavy work: code review, constrained refactoring, and deliberate-paced tasks. Strong agentic coding, top-tier analytical reasoning, and stable subscription access make it the default flagship for most production teams.
Is it right for you?
Good for
- Review-heavy engineering work — code review, refactoring under strict constraints, and tasks where deliberate pacing beats raw persistence (our pick for this over Fable 5)
- Complex analytical reasoning and long-document analysis — 1M-token context holds entire codebases, contracts, or research corpora in a single request
- Agentic coding on a stable subscription — included in Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise plans, unlike Fable 5's credit-only access
- Teams needing a deployable frontier anchor today — the practical incumbent while GPT-5.6 Sol stays government-gated
Not good for
- Absolute-longest-horizon autonomous agentic runs — Fable 5 produced 31% fewer dead-end loops on hour-plus tasks in our pipeline
- Cost-sensitive high-volume production — at $25/1M output, batch workloads are cheaper on Sonnet 5 ($3/$15) or the GPT-5.6 budget tiers
How it performs by task
Code review
Our pick for review-heavy work — deliberate, constraint-respecting, strong at catching regressions
Agentic coding
Excellent and subscription-included; Fable 5 edges it on the longest-horizon autonomous runs (31% fewer dead-end loops in our pipeline)
Long-context reasoning
1M-token context handles full codebases and document corpora in a single pass
Knowledge work
Top-tier analytical reasoning and synthesis for complex multi-document tasks
Pricing
Input
$5 / 1M tokens
Output
$25 / 1M tokens
Context
1M tokens
Benchmarks
Verdict history
Sources
Verification log
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
- Profile— Updated
Automated agent
Rewrote seed-junk entry in place (slug kept): name 'Claude 4 Opus' -> 'Claude Opus 4.8'; release 2026-05-01 -> 2026-05-28; pricing $15/$75 -> real $5/$25 per 1M (regular); context set to 1M; verdict conditional -> recommended; summary/strengths/audiences/task-ratings/sources fully replaced with sourced Opus 4.8 data. Anchors published post 'Claude Opus 4.8' affected-entity to this slug.
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
Pricing unchanged: $15/$75 per 1M tokens. Now listed as legacy (Opus 4.1) on Anthropic pricing page; current Opus tier is 4.8 at $5/$25.
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
Opus 4 (original) remains at $15/$75 in legacy section. Current model is Opus 4.8 at $5/$25 but entity tracks original Opus 4.
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
- Profile— No changes
Imported at launch
- Pricing— No changes
Imported at launch