Great seeing the price reduction. Opus historically was prices at 15/75, this one delivers at 5/25 which is close to Gemini 3 Pro. I hope Anthropic can afford increasing limits for the new Opus.
Not because I love Anthropic (I do like them) but because it's staving off me having to change my Coding Agent.
This world is changing fast, and both keeping up with State of the Art and/or the feeling of FOMO is exhausting.
Ive been holding onto Claude Code for the last little while since Ive built up a robust set of habits, slash commands, and sub agents that help me squeeze as much out of the platform as possible.
But with the last few releases of Gemini and Codex I've been getting closer and closer to throwing it all out to start fresh in a new ecosystem.
Thankfully Anthropic has come out swinging today and my own SOP's can remain in tact a little while longer.
Did anyone else notice Sonnet 4.5 being much dumber recently? I tried it today and it was really struggling with some very simple CSS on a 100-line self-contained HTML page. This never used to happen before, and now I'm wondering if this release has something to do with it.
On-topic, I love the fact that Opus is now three times cheaper. I hope it's available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription.
EDIT: Apparently it's not available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription, but you can add funds to your Claude wallet and use Opus with pay-as-you-go. This is going to be really nice to use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation with the Pro subscription.
However, I noticed that the previously-there option of "use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation" isn't there in Claude Code with this setup any more. Hopefully they'll implement it soon, as that would be the best of both worlds.
EDIT 2: Apparently you can use `/model opusplan` to get Opus in planning mode. However, it says "Uses your extra balance", and it's not clear whether it means it uses the balance just in planning mode, or also in execution mode. I don't want it to use my balance when I've got a subscription, I'll have to try it and see.
EDIT 3: It looks like Sonnet also consumes credits in this mode. I had it make some simple CSS changes to a single HTML file with Opusplan, and it cost me $0.95 (way too much, in my opinion). I'll try manually switching between Opus for the plan and regular Sonnet for the next test.
Yes, I've absolutely noticed this. I feel like I can always tell when something is up when it starts trying to do WAY more things than normal. Like I can give it a few functions and ask for some updates, and it just goes through like 6 rounds of thinking, creating 6 new files, assuming that I want to write changes to a database, etc.
I've played around with Gemini 3 Pro in Cursor, and honestly: I find it to be significantly worse than Sonnet 4.5. I've also had some problems that only Claude Code has been able to really solve; Sonnet 4.5 in there consistently performs better than Sonnet 4.5 anywhere else.
I think Anthropic is making the right decisions with their models. Given that software engineering is probably one of the very few domains of AI usage that is driving real, serious revenue: I have far better feelings about Anthropic going into 2026 than any other foundation model. Excited to put Opus 4.5 through its paces.
What you describe could also be the difference in the hallucination rate [0]. Opus 4.5 has the lead here and Gemini 3 Pro performs here quite bad compared to the other benchmarks.
Has there been any announcement of a new programming benchmark? SWE looks like it's close to saturation already. At this point for SWE it may be more interesting to start looking at which types of issues consistently fail/work between model families.
The burying of the lede here is insane. $5/$25 per MTok is a 3x price drop from Opus 4. At that price point, Opus stops being "the model you use for important things" and becomes actually viable for production workloads.
Also notable: they're claiming SOTA prompt injection resistance. The industry has largely given up on solving this problem through training alone, so if the numbers in the system card hold up under adversarial testing, that's legitimately significant for anyone deploying agents with tool access.
The "most aligned model" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting though. Would love to see third-party red team results.
Just on Claude Code, I didn't notice any performance difference from Sonnet 4.5 but if it's cheaper then that's pretty big! And it kinda confuses the original idea that Sonnet is the well rounded middle option and Opus is the sophisticated high end option.
It was already viable pricing before. You have to remember this is for business use. Many companies will pay 20% on top of an engineer's salary to have them be 200% as effective. Right?
I am truthfully surprised they dropped pricing. They don't really need to. The demand is quite high. This is all pretty much gatekeeping too (with the high pricing, across all providers). AI for coding can be expensive and companies want it to be because money is their edge. Funny because this is the same for the AI providers too. He who had the most GPUs, right?
Also it's really really good. Scarily good tbh. It's making PRs that work and aren't slop-filled and it figures out problems and traces through things in a way a competent engineer would rather than just fucking about.
The real question I have after seeing the usage rug being pulled is what this costs and how usable this ACTUALLY is with a Claude Max 20x subscription. In practice, Opus is basically unusable by anyone paying enterprise-prices. And the modification of "usage" quotas has made the platform fundamentally unstable, and honestly, it left me personally feeling like I was cheated by Anthropic...
Why do they always cut off 70% of the y-axis? Sure it exaggerates the differences, but... it exaggerates the differences.
And they left Haiku out of most of the comparisons! That's the most interesting model for me. Because for some tasks it's fine. And it's still not clear to me which ones those are.
Because in my experience, Haiku sits at this weird middle point where, if you have a well defined task, you can use a smaller/faster/cheaper model than Haiku, and if you don't, then you need to reach for a bigger/slower/costlier model than Haiku.
SWE's results were actually very close, but they used a poor marketing visualization. I know this isn't a research paper, but for Anthropic, I expect more.
This is gonna be game-changing for the next 2-4 weeks before they nerf the model.
Then for the next 2-3 months people complaining about the degradation will be labeled “skill issue”.
Then a sacrificial Anthropic engineer will “discover” a couple obscure bugs that “in some cases” might have lead to less than optimal performance. Still largely a user skill issue though.
Then a couple months later they’ll release Opus 4.7 and go through the cycle again.
My allegiance to these companies is now measured in nerf cycles.
You're forgetting the step where they write a nefarious paper for their marketing team about the "world-ending dangers" of the capabilities they've discovered within their new model, and push it out to their web of media companies who make bank from the ad-revenue from clicks on their doomsday articles while furthering the regulatory capture goals of the hypocritically Palantir-partnered Anthropic.
“For Max and Team Premium users, we’ve increased overall usage limits, meaning you’ll have roughly the same number of Opus tokens as you previously had with Sonnet.” — seems like anthropic has finally listened!
I used Gemini instead of my usual Claude for a non-trivial front-end project [1] and it really just hit it out of the park especially after the update last week, no trouble just directly emitting around 95% of the application. Now Claude is back! The pace of releases and competition seems to be heating up more lately, and there is absolutely no switching cost. It's going to be interesting to see if and how the frontier model vendors create a moat or if the coding CLIs/models will forever remain a commodity.
I'm curious if others are finding that there's a comfort in staying within the Claude ecosystem because when it makes a mistake, we get used to spotting the pattern. I'm finding that when I try new models, their "stupid" moments are more surprising and infuriating.
Given this tech is new, the experience of how we relate to their mistakes is something I think a bit about.
Am I alone here, are others finding themselves more forgiving of "their preferred" model provider?
Up until today, the general advice was use Opus for deep research, use Haiku for everything else. Given the reduction in cost here, does that rule of thumb no longer apply?
I wonder what this means for UX designers like myself who would love to take a screen from Figma and turn it into code with just a single call to the MCP. I've found that Gemini 3 in Figma Make works very well at one-shotting a page when it actually works (there's a lot of issues with it actually working, sadly), so hopefully Opus 4.5 is even better.
On my Max plan, Opus 4.5 is now the default model! Until now I used Sonnet 4.5 exclusively and never used Opus, even for planning - I'm shocked that this is so cheap (for them) that it can be the default now. I'm curious what this will mean for the daily/weekly limits.
A short run at a small toy app makes me feel like Opus 4.5 is a bit slower than Sonnet 4.5 was, but that could also just be the day-one load it's presumably under. I don't think Sonnet was holding me back much, but it's far too early to tell.
A really great way to get an idea of the relative cost and performance of these models at their various thinking budgets is to look at the ARC-AGI-2 leaderboard. Opus 4.5 stacks up very well here when you compare to Gemini 3’s score and cost. Gemini 3 Deep Think is still the current leaders but at more than 30x the cost.
The cost curve of achieving these scores is coming down rapidly. In Dec 2024 when OpenAI announced beating human performance on ARC-AGI-1, they spent more than $3k per task. You can get the same performance for pennies to dollars, approximately an 80x reduction in 11 months.
106 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 85.8 ms ] threadSo it’s 1/3 the price of Opus 4.1…
> [..] matches Sonnet 4.5’s best score on SWE-bench Verified, but uses 76% fewer output tokens
…and potentially uses a lot less tokens?
Excited to stress test this in Claude Code, looks like a great model on paper!
Not because I love Anthropic (I do like them) but because it's staving off me having to change my Coding Agent.
This world is changing fast, and both keeping up with State of the Art and/or the feeling of FOMO is exhausting.
Ive been holding onto Claude Code for the last little while since Ive built up a robust set of habits, slash commands, and sub agents that help me squeeze as much out of the platform as possible.
But with the last few releases of Gemini and Codex I've been getting closer and closer to throwing it all out to start fresh in a new ecosystem.
Thankfully Anthropic has come out swinging today and my own SOP's can remain in tact a little while longer.
On-topic, I love the fact that Opus is now three times cheaper. I hope it's available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription.
EDIT: Apparently it's not available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription, but you can add funds to your Claude wallet and use Opus with pay-as-you-go. This is going to be really nice to use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation with the Pro subscription.
However, I noticed that the previously-there option of "use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation" isn't there in Claude Code with this setup any more. Hopefully they'll implement it soon, as that would be the best of both worlds.
EDIT 2: Apparently you can use `/model opusplan` to get Opus in planning mode. However, it says "Uses your extra balance", and it's not clear whether it means it uses the balance just in planning mode, or also in execution mode. I don't want it to use my balance when I've got a subscription, I'll have to try it and see.
EDIT 3: It looks like Sonnet also consumes credits in this mode. I had it make some simple CSS changes to a single HTML file with Opusplan, and it cost me $0.95 (way too much, in my opinion). I'll try manually switching between Opus for the plan and regular Sonnet for the next test.
I think Anthropic is making the right decisions with their models. Given that software engineering is probably one of the very few domains of AI usage that is driving real, serious revenue: I have far better feelings about Anthropic going into 2026 than any other foundation model. Excited to put Opus 4.5 through its paces.
[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu...
[1] https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/pro/
Also notable: they're claiming SOTA prompt injection resistance. The industry has largely given up on solving this problem through training alone, so if the numbers in the system card hold up under adversarial testing, that's legitimately significant for anyone deploying agents with tool access.
The "most aligned model" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting though. Would love to see third-party red team results.
> Claude Opus 4.5 in Windsurf for 2x credits (instead of 20x for Opus 4.1)
https://old.reddit.com/r/windsurf/comments/1p5qcus/claude_op...
At the risk of sounding like a shill, in my personal experience, Windsurf is somehow still the best deal for an agentic VSCode fork.
I disagree, even if only because your model shouldn't have more access than any other front-end.
I am truthfully surprised they dropped pricing. They don't really need to. The demand is quite high. This is all pretty much gatekeeping too (with the high pricing, across all providers). AI for coding can be expensive and companies want it to be because money is their edge. Funny because this is the same for the AI providers too. He who had the most GPUs, right?
I’ve always found Opus significantly better than the benchmarks suggested.
LFG
And they left Haiku out of most of the comparisons! That's the most interesting model for me. Because for some tasks it's fine. And it's still not clear to me which ones those are.
Because in my experience, Haiku sits at this weird middle point where, if you have a well defined task, you can use a smaller/faster/cheaper model than Haiku, and if you don't, then you need to reach for a bigger/slower/costlier model than Haiku.
Then for the next 2-3 months people complaining about the degradation will be labeled “skill issue”.
Then a sacrificial Anthropic engineer will “discover” a couple obscure bugs that “in some cases” might have lead to less than optimal performance. Still largely a user skill issue though.
Then a couple months later they’ll release Opus 4.7 and go through the cycle again.
My allegiance to these companies is now measured in nerf cycles.
I’m a nerf cycle customer.
[1] https://github.com/jasonthorsness/tree-dangler
Given this tech is new, the experience of how we relate to their mistakes is something I think a bit about.
Am I alone here, are others finding themselves more forgiving of "their preferred" model provider?
A short run at a small toy app makes me feel like Opus 4.5 is a bit slower than Sonnet 4.5 was, but that could also just be the day-one load it's presumably under. I don't think Sonnet was holding me back much, but it's far too early to tell.
The cost curve of achieving these scores is coming down rapidly. In Dec 2024 when OpenAI announced beating human performance on ARC-AGI-1, they spent more than $3k per task. You can get the same performance for pennies to dollars, approximately an 80x reduction in 11 months.
https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough
Even better: Sonnet 4.5 now has its own separate limit.