Claude Opus 4.8

Claude Opus 4.8 (May 2026) is Anthropic's top tier — best-in-class agentic coding and reasoning, a 1M-token context and careful, low-error output, priced and paced as a flagship.

Best for

• Hardest reasoning and long-horizon agentic coding
• Frontier math, science and complex multi-file refactors
• Whole-codebase / large-document analysis (1M context)
• When you need the most capable widely-available Claude

How it compares — and the India angle

• Most expensive and slowest tier — Sonnet 4.6 gives ~99% of its coding quality at far lower cost and ~2x speed.
• Indian teams pay in USD ($5/$25 per 1M) — reserve Opus for genuinely hard tasks, route bulk work to Sonnet/Haiku.
• Trades blows with Gemini 3.1 Pro on science (GPQA) but leads on SWE-bench coding.