Anthropic’s newest Claude AI models are experts at programming

Yesterday in an announcement blog post, AI company Anthropic unveiled Claude 4, its new generation of AI models consisting of Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet with a range of new abilities.

Both Claude 4 models are hybrid models, which means they’re capable of giving you short-and-quick answers or thinking longer on their responses with deeper reasoning. They’re also better at following your instructions more precisely and using different tools in parallel.

Claude 4 Opus is excellent at solving complex problems and at programming. In fact, according to Anthropic, it’s the world’s best AI model for programming. The model can maintain its performance in long tasks over several hours with thousands of different steps.

Meanwhile, Anthropic says Claude 4 Sonnet is a huge upgrade over Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s abilities. The newer Claude 4 Sonnet is still good at coding, but not as good as Claude 4 Opus; instead, Sonnet has a better balance between skill and practicality.

Claude 4 Sonnet will be available for free, but if you want to access Claude 4 Opus, you’ll have to pay for one of Anthropic’s subscriptions.