Claude Opus 4.8
by Anthropic
Anthropic’s frontier Opus release between 4.6 and Opus 5 — the model most competitors benchmarked against through mid-2026.
Part of the Claude Opus 4 series.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2026-05-24 | Leaks alongside Sonnet 4.8 and Mythos 1 |
| 2026-07 | Widely available; noted as “acting like Opus 5” in capability |
| 2026-08 | Displaced in benchmark coverage by Qwen 3.8 Max, Muse Spark 1.2, Ornith 1.5 |
Notes
Opus 4.8 became the de-facto reference point for “frontier” during summer 2026 — the model
open-weight releases measured themselves against. Coverage is dominated not by Anthropic’s
own launch material but by challengers claiming to match or beat it, usually at far lower cost:
Qwen 3.8 Max, Muse Spark 1.2 (Meta), DeepSeek V4 Flash via OpenCode, and Ornith 1.5.
That pattern is the story: by August 2026 matching Opus 4.8 was table stakes for open-weight
models, and the differentiator had shifted to price and local runnability.