Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Opus 4 that reportedly improves on agentic tasks, computer coding and reasoning. Pricing has not increased from what customers were paying for Opus 4, and the company promises “substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.” The move comes as Anthropic nears a new funding round targeting $3 to $5 billion, which could place a valuation of up to $170 billion on the startup. Recurring revenue hit $5 billion as of late July, which could increase to $9 billion by the end of the year. Claude Opus 4.1 was released two days before OpenAI unleashed GPT-5, and performs comparably in coding benchmarks.

Anthropic claims in a news post that Claude Opus 4.1 scored 74.5 percent on SWE-bench Verified, which tests a model’s ability to solve real-world software engineering questions.

That put it just slightly behind the 74.9 percent OpenAI claims GPT-5 achieved on the same test (though as of this writing neither result was reflected on SWE’s public leaderboard, which can lag real world results). Anthropic says Claude beat Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro’s 67.2 percent on the Verified test.

ZDNet says Claude Opus 4’s SWE-bench Verified performance supported Anthropic’s “claim that it was the ‘best coding model in the world’” and “Opus 4.1 performed even higher.” That is reflected on the public leaderboard, where Opus 4 appears as the first standalone model (tied for third with three agentic frameworks) on the Verified tab.

Opus 4.1 is available to paid Claude plan subscribers as well as on Anthropic’ s terminal-based coding assistant Claude Code. It is also being distributed via API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI.

Anthropic’s “Claude Code subscription service, priced at $200 monthly compared to $20 for consumer plans, has reached $400 million in annual recurring revenue after doubling in just weeks, demonstrating enormous enterprise appetite for AI coding tools,” writes VentureBeat, noting that “the company’s meteoric rise has created a dangerous dependency: nearly half of its $3.1 billion in API revenue stems from just two customers — coding assistant Cursor and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot — generating $1.4 billion combined.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by alums from OpenAI, which was recently valued at $300 billion.

“While OpenAI dominates consumer and business subscription revenue with broader applications, Anthropic has carved out a commanding position in the developer market,” VentureBeat reports, noting Claude Opus 4.1 comes with “stricter safety protocols.”

In June, Anthropic released “stress test” results from a study of 16 leading models. Operating in hypothetical corporate environments, all were inclined toward “malicious insider behavior” when faced with the threat of replacement or shutdown.

Anthropic calls the phenomenon “agentic misalignment,” emphasizing there was no evidence of it “in real deployments,” nonetheless urging “caution about deploying current models in roles with minimal human oversight and access to sensitive information.”

Related:
Anthropic Claude Opus 4.1 Is Now in Public Preview in GitHub Copilot, GitHub, 8/5/25
Claude Opus 4.1: Anthropic Delivers Better Coding, Debugging, Analytics Abilities, TechRepublic, 8/6/25
Anthropic Yanks OpenAI’s Access to Claude Model, PYMNTS, 8/4/25