Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4 for Advanced Coding

This updated guide explores anthropic launches claude opus 4 for advanced coding with practical details, clear explanations, and useful takeaways. Anthropic today announced the next generation of its Claude models: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. The company claims that Claude Opus 4 — the most advanced version — is the world's most powerful programming model, excelling at agentic workflows and handling complex.

According to the comparison chart below, Claude Sonnet 4 scored an all-time high of 72.7% on SWE-bench Verified — a popular benchmark for automated programming capabilities. With this strength, Microsoft's GitHub announced that Sonnet 4 will be the core model for the new programming agent in GitHub Copilot .

Anthropic describes the performance of the new models as follows:

These models advance customers' AI strategies across the board: Opus 4 breaks boundaries in programming, research, writing, and scientific discovery, while Sonnet 4 brings cutting-edge performance to everyday tasks as an immediate upgrade from Sonnet 3.7.

Both new Claude 4 models support two modes:

1. Almost instant response
2. Extended Thinking (for problems that require in-depth analysis) Programmers can switch between the two modes as needed.

Claude free users only get access to the Sonnet 4 model, while Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users get access to both models and extended thinking. Anthropic also says the models are available on the Anthropic API , Amazon Bedrock , and Google Cloud's Vertex AI . Notably, Anthropic isn't offering discounts on the new models:

• Claude Opus 4: $15/1 million input tokens and $75/1 million output tokens
• Claude Sonnet 4: $3/1 million input tokens and $15/1 million output tokens

Along with the new models, Anthropic announced updates to Claude Code with support for background tasks via GitHub Actions , native integration with VS Code and JetBrains , and more. Also, the Anthropic API adds a code execution tool, MCP connectivity, Files API, and the ability to cache prompts for up to 1 hour .