Anthropic, backed by Amazon (AMZN, Financial) and Alphabet (GOOGL), has unveiled its next-generation AI models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, designed for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents. Claude Opus 4 is touted as the best coding model globally, excelling in complex, long-duration tasks and workflows. Claude Sonnet 4, a significant upgrade from Sonnet 3.7, offers superior coding and reasoning capabilities with more precise instruction responses.
Additional updates include enhanced tool usage during extended thinking processes, allowing Claude to improve answer quality by switching between reasoning and tool usage, such as web searches. Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions accurately, and demonstrate improved memory when accessing local files. Claude Code is now fully available, and new features on the Anthropic API, like code execution tools, MCP connectors, Files API, and cache hints, enhance AI agent development.
Pricing remains consistent with previous models: Opus 4 costs $15/$75 per million tokens (input/output), and Sonnet 4 costs $3/$15. Anthropic competes with major AI players like Alphabet's Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Recently, Google updated its Gemini AI, and OpenAI launched GPT-4.5. Meta Platforms (META) also introduced its Llama 4 series open-source language models. Other significant AI contributors include Chinese companies like Baidu (BIDU), Alibaba (BABA), and DeepSeek.
