Anthropic launches Claude 4, its most powerful AI model yet

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI rival, on Thursday launched its most powerful group of artificial intelligence models yet: Claude 4.

The company said the two models, called Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, are defining a “new standard” when it comes to AI agents and “can analyze thousands of data sources, execute long-running tasks, write human-quality content, and perform complex actions,” per a release.

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI research executives, launched its Claude chatbot in March 2023. since then, it’s been part of the increasingly heated AI arms race taking place between startups and tech giants alike, a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Companies in seemingly every industry are rushing to add AI-powered chatbots and agents to avoid being left behind by competitors.

Anthropic stopped investing in chatbots at the end of last year and has instead focused on improving Claude’s ability to do complex tasks like research and coding, even writing whole code bases, according to Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer.

He also acknowledged that “the more complex the task is, the more risk there is that the model is going to kind of go off the rails … and we’re really focused on addressing that so that people can really delegate a lot of work at once to our models.”

“We’ve been training these models since last year and really anticipating them,” Kaplan said in an interview. “I think these models are much, much stronger as agents and as coders. It was definitely a struggle internally just because some of the new infrastructure we were using to train these models… made it very down-to-the-wire for the teams in terms of getting everything up and running.”

Kaplan added that once they tried to get the model testers to switch back off of the new models because they needed to iterate on them, no one wanted to give up access.

Anthropic said Claude Opus 4 was the “best coding model in the world” and could autonomously work for nearly a full corporate workday — seven hours.

Both models can search the web to complete tasks on a user’s behalf and alternate between reasoning and tool use, according to Anthropic. The company also said that when given access to local files, they can extract and save “key facts to maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time.”

“I do a lot of writing with Claude, and I think prior to Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, I was mostly using the models as a thinking partner, but still doing most of the writing myself,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, said in an interview. “And they’ve crossed this threshold where now most of my writing is actually … Opus mostly, and it now is unrecognizable from my writing.”

Krieger added, “I love that we’re kind of pushing the frontier on two sides. Like one is the coding piece and agentic behavior overall, and that’s powering a lot of these coding startups. … But then also, we’re pushing the frontier on how these models can actually learn from and then be a really useful writing partner, too.”

Anthropic’s annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, the company confirmed last week, more than doubling from a $1 billion rate in the prior period. Revenue chief Kate Jensen said in a recent interview with CNBC that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually with Anthropic jumped eightfold from a year ago.

Wall Street continues to pour money into AI startups like Anthropic: The company received a $2.5 billion, five-year revolving credit line last week to amp up its liquidity in an ever-expanding — and expensive — AI competition.