Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.1 amid rival ChatGPT’s advancements

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic released an upgraded version of Claude Opus 4 on Tuesday to build capabilities in real-world coding, agentic research, creative writing and reasoning.

The company said it aims to bring larger improvements in the coming weeks.



The development comes after rival OpenAI announced on Tuesday the release of two open-weight language models, which are designed for advanced reasoning and are optimised to run on laptops, performing similarly to OpenAI’s smaller proprietary models.

Opus 4.1 is currently available to paid Claude users and in Claude Code. It's also available through tools for developers like Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud's Vertex AI.

Additionally, the price for using Opus 4.1 is the same as it was for the previous version, i.e., Opus 4. Pricing for Claude Opus 4.1 starts at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens.

Claude Opus 4.1

Opus 4.1 by Anthropic advanced the state-of-the-art coding performance to 74.5% on SWE-bench Verified that tests real-world coding problems, along with in-depth research and data analysis skills.

According to GitHub, Opus 4.1 has enhanced its capabilities in multi-file code refactoring. Multi-file code refactoring means improving or reorganising code that is spread across multiple files while keeping the programme’s behaviour unchanged.


Developer-focussed AI coding startup Windsurf reported that Opus 4.1 delivers a one-standard-deviation improvement over Opus 4 on their junior developer benchmark, showing roughly the same performance leap as the jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4.

The broader picture

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees. The San Francisco-based company is generating about $5 billion in annualised revenue, Bloomberg News has reported.

In May this year, Google- and Amazon-backed Anthropic introduced its next-generation AI agents, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, with coding and advanced reasoning capabilities.

On facing stiff competition with giants like OpenAI, Anthropic's chief product officer Mike Krieger told Bloomberg that it was focussing on its own progress rather than competitors like OpenAI. The priority, he said, is delivering value to current customers.

In a separate development, Anthropic’s Claude is now listed on the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule on Tuesday, making its products readily accessible to US federal government departments and agencies with pre-negotiated pricing and terms that comply with federal acquisition regulations.