Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.8, Surpasses Value of OpenAI

Anthropic logged two major milestones today: It released its latest AI model and it surpassed the financial value of OpenAI, its biggest competitor.

“We’re upgrading Claude Opus to a new version: Claude Opus 4.8,” Anthropic announced. “It builds on Opus 4.7 with improvements across benchmarks, and is a more effective collaborator. It’s available today for the same price.”

Opus 4.8 launches alongside several new Claude features, including a dynamic workflows feature that helps users tackle very large-scale problems and a way to control how much effort the AI puts into solving a problem. And its fast mode, which is 2.5x faster than the default mode, is now three times less expensive than before.

Opus 4.8 shows gains across a range of benchmarks, with the biggest improvements coming in agentic terminal coding, knowledge work, and agentic financial analysis. And early testers told Anthropic it was more reliable and sharper in its judgment when performing agentic tasks.

“One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty,” Anthropic noted. “We train all our models to be honest … but a general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, confidently claiming to have made progress in their work despite the evidence being thin. Early testers report that Opus 4.8 is more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims. This is borne out in our evaluations, which show that Opus 4.8 is around four times less likely than its predecessor to allow flaws in code it has written to pass unremarked.”

As for its new valuation, Anthropic also announced today that it has raised $65 billion in Series H funding, which brings its value to $965 billion, surpassing the $852 billion value of OpenAI.

“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said. “This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens.”