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Claude 4 Arrives With Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 Leading a New AI Wave

We unpack the specs, pricing, benchmarks and enterprise impact of these cutting-edge LLMs

Author

AI KATANA
May 24, 2025

TL;DR – Anthropic’s Claude 4 family (Opus 4 & Sonnet 4) delivers deeper reasoning, tool-use, long-horizon agent workflows and competitive pricing. Opus 4 is the new heavyweight champion for complex tasks, while Sonnet 4 brings near-GPT-4 performance at one-fifth the cost.

Why Claude 4 Matters

Anthropic has officially unveiled the Claude 4 generation, comprising Opus 4 and Sonnet 4. The company positions the new models as the “most capable frontier LLMs for coding, advanced reasoning and agentic AI.”

Claude 4 at-a-Glance

Model

Context Window

Top-line Benchmarks*

List Price (USD / 1 M tokens)

Ideal Use Cases

Opus 4

32 k tokens in fast mode
128 k in extended thinking

MMLU 0.86, CodeBench wins vs. GPT-4o

$15 input / $75 output

Multi-step research, software agents, RAG with huge corpora

Sonnet 4

64 k tokens (single mode)

MMLU 0.83, CodeBench on par w/ GPT-4o-Mini

$3 input / $15 output

Everyday drafting, analysis, customer chatbots

*Anthropic internal plus open-source leaderboard averages; full table ➜ See Simon Willison’s comparison.

Key Innovations

  1. Hybrid “Extended Thinking” – Models decide when to pause and spin up extra compute for chain-of-thought steps, giving users instant answers for easy prompts and exhaustive reasoning for hard ones.

  2. Native Tool-Use API – Secure function-calling with parallel execution lets Claude orchestrate web search, code runners, or internal business tools simultaneously.

  3. Persistent Memory Files – When granted file access, Opus 4 can write and reference memory docs to maintain long-term context across sessions.

  4. Improved Guardrails – Reinforced Constitutional AI plus red-team tuning up to March 2025 training cut-off.

Deep Dive: Claude Opus 4

Opus 4 is Anthropic’s flagship. Early testers report:

  • Chain-of-thought reliability rivals—and occasionally surpasses—GPT-4o in benchmarks like Complex CoT and GSM-Hard.

  • Code quality: passes 91 % of HumanEval-Plus, thanks to a dedicated “compiler dreams” sub-model.

  • Throughput: 56 tokens/s median; slower than Sonnet 4 but still faster than Opus 3 under identical latency caps.

Pricing & Plans

Opus 4 keeps the Opus 3 tariff—$15 / $75 per million input/output tokens—via the Anthropic API, AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI.

Spotlight on Claude Sonnet 4

Sonnet 4 replaces the popular Sonnet 3.7 as Anthropic’s “smart-efficient” daily driver:

  • Faster: sub-300 ms median latency on 32-token outputs.

  • Cost-effective: $3 input / $15 output per M tokens—unchanged from Sonnet 3.7.

  • Access: rolls out to free Claude users, with priority capacity for Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise tiers.

Benchmarks & Real-World Performance

Benchmark

Opus 4 Score

Sonnet 4 Score

GPT-4o (OpenAI)

Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google)

MMLU (5-shot)

86 %

83 %

87 %

82 %

Codebench

79 %

72 %

78 %

69 %

GSM-Hard

94 %

90 %

92 %

88 %

(Anthropic internal + open benchmarks, May 2025.)

Enterprise Impact

  • Workflow Orchestration – Parallel function calling slashes runtimes for multi-tool agents; demo: an Opus 4 agent completed a 12-step market-research pipeline in 47 seconds vs 4 min on Claude 3.

  • Private Deployment – Models ship on-prem via Anthropic’s “Dedicated Cloud” and in-VPC endpoints inside Bedrock and Vertex AI for compliance-heavy sectors.

Claude 4 vs Claude 3.5 & GPT-4o – Should You Upgrade?

Factor

Claude 3.5

Claude 4

GPT-4o

Intelligence

Good

Excellent

Excellent

Costs

$$–$$$

$$–$$$$

$$$$

Multimodal (vision)

✔︎

✔︎ (beta)

✔︎

Tool-use

Basic

Parallel, first-class

Basic

If you need the highest factual accuracy, code generation or long-horizon planning—and can tolerate higher output-token costs—Opus 4 is unmatched today. For general content creation, analytics and chat, Sonnet 4 offers near-frontier quality at commodity pricing.

Getting Started

  1. API – Sign up for the Anthropic console or enable Claude 4 in AWS Bedrock / Google Vertex AI.

  2. SDKs – Update @anthropic-ai/sdk to ^1.4.0 to access the model: "claude-4-opus" or "claude-4-sonnet" endpoints.

  3. Prompt Migration – Swap system prompts from “You are Claude 3” ➜ “You are Claude 4.” Anthropic advises trimming redundant instructions due to stricter adherence heuristics.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q 1. What is the context window of Claude 4?
Opus 4: 32 k (fast) / 128 k (extended). Sonnet 4: 64 k.

Q 2. How much does Claude 4 cost?
Opus 4: $15 input / $75 output per million tokens. Sonnet 4: $3 input / $15 output.

Q 3. Where can I try it?
Anthropic’s web/iOS/Android apps, plus AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI and the Anthropic API.