⏳ In Brief
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Anthropic launches Claude 4 models focused on smarter, longer, and deeper AI reasoning.
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Claude Opus 4 excels at extended coding tasks, showing superior software engineering benchmarks.
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Claude Sonnet 4 balances power and affordability, ideal for versatile AI deployments.
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New features include “extended thinking”, enhancing reasoning and tool use.
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Claude Code is now available for developers, integrated into GitHub, VS Code & more.
🚀 Claude 4 Is Here—and It’s a Game-Changer for AI Coding
Anthropic has officially released Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet, setting a new benchmark in how AI tackles reasoning-heavy and developer-oriented tasks.
These models aren’t just upgrades, they represent a leap forward in AI capability, focus, and usability across coding, enterprise workflows, and real-world applications.
Introducing the next generation: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.
Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the world’s best coding model.
Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade from its predecessor, delivering superior coding and reasoning. pic.twitter.com/MJtczIvGE9
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) May 22, 2025
🧠 Claude Opus 4: Designed for Deep Focus
Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic’s most capable model yet. It’s built to sustain concentration across thousands of steps, enabling developers to offload lengthy, multi-stage tasks without loss of context or accuracy.
“Claude Opus 4 can maintain a thread of reasoning across thousands of steps,” stated Anthropic in its launch announcement.
This is especially useful in long-form coding, multi-document analysis, and strategy generation.
Benchmark tests confirm its prowess:
- 72.5% on SWE-bench, a top-tier software engineering challenge
- 43.2% on Terminal-bench, reflecting robust command-line problem solving
These results show Claude 4’s potential as a serious development tool, not just a chatbot.
🎯 Claude Sonnet 4: Smart, Swift & Scalable
Claude Sonnet 4 isn’t just a smaller version—it’s a high-performance, cost-effective AI meant for fast yet nuanced reasoning.
It slightly edged out Opus in SWE-bench performance, scoring 72.7%—a testament to Anthropic’s focused improvements.
“Sonnet is tuned for responsiveness and cost-efficiency while maintaining reasoning depth,” Anthropic stated.
For businesses and dev teams looking to balance budget and capability, Sonnet 4 is a compelling alternative.
🧠 “Extended Thinking”: The Real Innovation
One of the most talked-about features in Claude 4 is “extended thinking”. It allows the model to switch between internal reasoning and external tool use, enabling dynamic problem-solving across multiple contexts.
“Claude can pause, use a calculator or a code interpreter, then resume its reasoning,” explained the Anthropic team.
This workflow-aware model behavior represents a major step toward agent-like functionality, enabling Claude to work like a digital teammate rather than a one-off prompt responder.
With “extended thinking,” Claude can use tools, write code, verify output, and revise based on results, on their own.
💻 Claude Code: Devs, Meet Your New AI Pair Programmer
Accompanying the model release is Claude Code, a suite of developer tools now generally available.
Developers can now:
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Integrate Claude with GitHub Actions
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Code alongside Claude in VS Code or JetBrains
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Use Claude for linting, refactoring, bug fixing, and even full feature implementation
This is part of Anthropic’s push to position Claude not just as a chatbot, but as a full development assistant.
💲 Where and How to Use Claude 4
Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are now accessible via:
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Anthropic’s API
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Amazon Bedrock
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Google Cloud Vertex AI
Pricing structure:
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Opus 4: $15 per million input tokens, $75 per million output tokens
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Sonnet 4: $3 input / $15 output per million tokens
Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plan users can access both models and extended thinking. Free users get access to Sonnet 4.
🧠 Final Thought: Claude 4 Moves AI from Assistant to Teammate
Anthropic’s Claude 4 models represent more than incremental upgrades—they hint at a future where AI can reason, plan, and act with minimal intervention.
With competitive performance, deep reasoning, and dev-focused features, Claude 4 is shaping up to be a pivotal force in AI-powered productivity.
