Anthropic Unveils Claude 4, its ‘Most Powerful AI Model Yet’

Amazon-backed Anthropic announced the launch of Claude 4, calling it the “most powerful group of AI models yet.”

According to the company, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 set new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents.

Claude Opus 4 is the “world’s best coding model,” with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to instructions.

Claude Opus 4 delivers sustained performance on long-running tasks that require focused effort and thousands of steps, with the ability to work continuously for several hours. Claude Opus 4 excels at coding and complex problem-solving, powering frontier agent products. 

Claude Opus 4 also dramatically outperforms all previous models on memory capabilities. When developers build applications that provide Claude local file access, Opus 4 becomes skilled at creating and maintaining 'memory files' to store key information. This unlocks better long-term task awareness, coherence, and performance on agent tasks.

Additionally, Claude Code, now generally available, brings the power of Claude to more of the development workflow—in the terminal, to favorite IDEs, or running in the background with the Claude Code SDK.

Alongside these models, Anthropic also announced:

• Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools—like web search—during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve responses.
• New model capabilities: Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and—when given access to local files by developers—demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting, and saving key facts to maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time.
• Claude Code is now generally available: After receiving extensive positive feedback during the research preview, developers can collaborate with Claude. Claude Code now supports background tasks via GitHub Actions and native integrations with VS Code and JetBrains, displaying edits directly in your files for seamless pair programming.
• New API capabilities: Four new capabilities on the Anthropic API that enable developers to build more powerful AI agents including the code execution tool, MCP connector, Files API, and the ability to cache prompts for up to one hour.

“These models are a large step toward the virtual collaborator—maintaining full context, sustaining focus on longer projects, and driving transformational impact,” according to the company.

For more information about this news, visit www.anthropic.com.