Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8
Pitched as an incremental flagship upgrade over Opus 4.7 — widely-cited early reviews called it a modest but tangible improvement — with pricing unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output. It is the reference point Anthropic benchmarks its own cheaper models against: Sonnet 5 was marketed as 'close to Opus 4.8 at lower prices'.
Available same-day on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and GitHub Copilot. It is the current Opus tier and the routing target for restricted queries under Fable 5's safety fallbacks.
Reality review pending — we publish the executive verdict after the launch has had time to meet the real world.
This is the model most enterprise Claude deployments actually run as their top tier, and its price has held flat across three consecutive Opus versions — capability per dollar keeps improving without contract renegotiation. It also anchors the comparison for every cheaper model now claiming 'Opus-class' performance.