Claude Opus 4.8

Anthropic·May 2026reasoningproprietary

Claude Opus 4.8 (May 2026) is the strongest model in the Claude 4.x line. It introduced adaptive thinking — the model decides how much reasoning each task deserves — plus four effort levels and a Fast Mode at 2x price for premium-speed inference. With 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified, leadership on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and a 1M-token context window at standard pricing, it is the model to beat for serious coding agents. Pricing stayed at $5/$25 per million tokens, undercutting GPT-5.5 on output cost.

Benchmark results

Where it shines

  • Top-tier agentic coding and terminal operation
  • Adaptive thinking with low/high/xhigh/max effort controls
  • 1M context window at standard pricing
  • Cheaper output tokens than its OpenAI flagship rival

Alternatives to Claude Opus 4.8

Frequently asked questions

How much does the Claude Opus 4.8 API cost?
Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.5 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $87.50.
What is the context window of Claude Opus 4.8?
Claude Opus 4.8 supports a context window of 1,000,000 tokens (1M), with up to 64K output tokens per response.
Is Claude Opus 4.8 open source?
No — Claude Opus 4.8 is a proprietary model available through Anthropic's API and partner platforms.
What are the best alternatives to Claude Opus 4.8?
The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.