During its inaugural developer conference, Anthropic launched two new AI models the startup claims are among the industry's best, at least in terms of how they score on popular benchmarks.

Claude 4 Sonnet is a leaner model, with improvements built on Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. The 3.7 model often had problems with overeagerness and sometimes did more than the user asked it to do, Amodei said. While it's a less resource-intensive model, it still performs well, he said.

Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic’s most powerful AI model to date, according to the company’s announcement, and capable of working continuously on long-running tasks for “several