Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. Same price as Opus 4.7, fast mode at 2.5x speed, fast mode 3x cheaper than before. Alongside the model release: dynamic workflows in Claude Code and effort control in claude.ai.
This post covers the benchmark numbers, the practical changes for coding and agents, and what teams building on Claude should pay attention to.
Benchmark Numbers
The numbers that matter most for developers:
SWE-Bench Pro (agentic coding): Opus 4.8 = 69.2%, Opus 4.7 = 64.3%, GPT-5.5 = 58.6%, Gemini 3.1 Pro = 54.2%. A 4.9 point gain over the previous version and a 10.6 point lead over GPT-5.5.
