Anthropic Opus 4.8 is cheaper but faster
anthropic released claude opus 4.8 with improved coding and dynamic agents, adding effort controls and fast mode that cuts costs in half.
anthropic released claude opus 4.8, bringing improved coding benchmarks and dynamic agent workflows to its platform, alongside a new 'effort' control that lets users manage the trade-off between speed, cost, and quality. the update introduces a fast mode processing at 2.5x speed and half the cost of standard mode, while claude code gains capabilities for handling large codebases via parallel sub-agents. anthropic also previewed its roadmap for cheaper models and the upcoming 'mythos-class' release, signaling a shift toward exposing raw token costs to users.