In late May 2026, operators running Claude Code on Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4-8) filed two structurally different failures within the same few days. One burns money. The other corrupts correctness.
I run Claude Code autonomously, around the clock, so neither of these was abstract for me. And as of June 12, both are still being reported on the latest builds — with no fix announcement I could find. The billing change landing on June 15 makes the cost one especially worth understanding now.
Failure 1: 46,000 tokens for a trivial task
The first failure hits your bill directly.
In the anchor report, a routine rename-impact scan — a boring "where is this symbol used" task — made Opus 4.8 emit 46,433 output tokens after 22 minutes and 43 seconds of thinking. The effort setting was medium. This wasn't a crash or a retry loop; the turn completed normally (stop_reason: end_turn).
