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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Claude Opus 4.8 promises more honest AI answers.
- Dynamic workflows can run hundreds of Claude subagents.
- Fast mode gets cheaper, while regular Opus pricing stays put.
Diogenes was a fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher known for his performance art. He is said to have roamed the streets of Athens in the middle of the day, carrying a lit lantern, crying out, “I am looking for an honest man.” If that myth were modernized for the present day, we’d all be looking for an honest AI.
Anthropic is both announcing and releasing Claude Opus 4.8, a large language model it believes might have satisfied Diogenes’ quest.
“One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty,” the company said Thursday in a blog post.
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Now, perhaps, this new frontier model will behave itself better. Anthropic reports that Opus 4.8 is less likely to make unsupported claims. It’s also more likely to tell you when it’s uncertain of an answer.
“This is borne out in our evaluations, which show that Opus 4.8 is around 4x less likely than its predecessor to allow flaws in code it’s written to pass unremarked,” the company said.
In Claude Code, I found Opus 4.7 to be a substantial improvement over 4.6. While 4.6 would often misinterpret instructions or deliver erroneous results, Opus 4.7 regularly tells me that the way it first looked at a problem didn’t work, and it’s taking a different tactic. Recent project assignments have shown a much greater degree of understanding than with 4.6.
So, given the jump in quality from 4.6 to 4.7, which was subjectively quite noticeable over many sessions, I’m hoping we’ll see the same in the jump from 4.7 to 4.8.
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It would seem this is the case, at least according to Tom Pritchard, staff engineer at Spotify, who has already tested Opus 4.8.
“Claude Opus 4.8 has noticeably better judgment. In Claude Code, it asks the right questions, catches its own mistakes, pushes back when a plan isn’t sound, and builds up confidence around complex, multi-service explorations before making big changes. It’s a great model to build with,” he said in the blog post.
That’ll be nice.
A matter of effort
Claude Code has had the ability to set effort since at least 4.7 (at least, that’s when I first noticed it). Effort is essentially a measure of how much AI oomph the model throws at a problem, measured in tokens.
In Opus 4.8, Claude Code’s default of high effort produces what the company said is “the best overall balance of quality and user experience.” In coding tasks, this default spends a similar number of tokens as the default level offered in Claude Code Opus 4.7, but with better performance.
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This effort capability is now moving into Claude.ai and Cowork. With higher effort settings, Claude will “think more frequently and more deeply.” With a lower effort set, Claude responds faster, and users will find their AI experiences are throttled less.
Dynamic workflows
At launch time, this feature hasn’t been fully defined, but it’s interesting. Launching as a research preview, Opus 4.8 can plan work, run hundreds of parallel subagents in one session, and verify outputs before reporting back. This feature is designed for very large-scale tasks. The example Anthropic gave was codebase-scale migrations across hundreds of thousands of lines.
It seems like Claude can generate and manage the workflow as the task evolves. Rather than running off a fixed plan, agents can change their priorities and tasks based on what they find while doing their work. This could be powerful.
Anthropic said that the subagents verify their results before reporting back to users. If Claude is coordinating hundreds of subagents, users need it to notice uncertainty, bad assumptions, and failed outputs.
Interestingly, this connects right back to the honesty claims discussed at the beginning of the article. If Claude is going to launch “thousands of agents,” getting back reliable and vetted results really matters, because there’s no way human oversight can keep up on its own.
The dynamic workflows capability will be available to Claude Code users on Enterprise, Team, and Max plans.
Price and availability
Anthropic said Claude Opus 4.8 is available everywhere Thursday through Claude and the Claude API as claude-opus-4-8.
In practice, especially if you’re using Claude Code, you might find that you’ll need to restart your session or wait a day or so for Claude Code to notice it. When Anthropic jumped Opus 4.6 to 4.7, I kept asking Claude Code what model it was using, and it wasn’t until the next morning that it stopped reporting Opus 4.6 and started reporting Opus 4.7.
Overall pricing hasn’t changed since Opus 4.7. Regular token-based pricing remains $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
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The company said that fast mode, which enables the model to work at 2.5 times the speed of normal mode, will be “three times cheaper than it was for previous models.” While I don’t spend on fast mode, I do see the appeal. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube, waiting for Claude Code to respond to a prompt, hour after hour.
Would you rather have Claude respond faster with lower effort or think longer with higher effort? Let us know in the comments below.
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