What is the maximum context and output budget of Claude Opus 4.8?

Name: Claude Opus 4.8
Price: 10 USD
Author: Anthropic

AnthropicReasoningProprietary Commercial APIReleased: 2026-05-21

Claude Opus 4.8

The peak culmination of Anthropic's Claude 4 architecture, featuring half-million-token context, 87.5% SWE-bench Verified, and lowered flagship pricing ($10/$50).

Jump to Code Compare Architecture Documentation

Foundation DNA96/100

HYBRID-REASONING ArchProprietary params

At a Glance Specifications

Context Window

500k

~375k words input

Token Pricing

$10 / $50

Prompt / Completion per 1M

Top Benchmark

87.5 % resolved

SWE-bench Verified

Hardware Tier

Cloud Managed

Zero local VRAM

Compare Claude Opus 4.8 vs:vsClaude Opus 4.7 vsClaude Opus 5 vsClaude Opus 4 vsClaude Sonnet 4

6-Axis Foundation Model DNA

Holistic Capability Distribution

Normalized 0-100 rating vectors balanced across intelligence, throughput, and economics.

Overall Index:96/100

Context: 98/100 (Window Horizon)

ReasoningGPQA / Logic / Math

99/100

CodingSWE-bench / LCB

97/100

SpeedTokens / Second

75/100

EconomicsCost Efficiency

68/100

ContextWindow Horizon

98/100

FlexibilityTool Use & Open

96/100

Performance Evaluations

Verified LLM Benchmarks

Empirical evaluations across academic reasoning, software engineering, agentic execution, and human preference.

SWE-bench Verified Headline

87.5% resolved

swebench.harness

CodingAnthropic Claude 4.8 Release

GPQA Diamond Headline

92.8% pass@1

Inspect

Academic ReasoningAnthropic Claude 4.8 Release

Chatbot Arena Elo Headline

1520Elo

LMSYS Blind Pairwise Battles

Human Preferencehttps://chat.lmsys.org/

MATH-500 Headline

99.4% pass@1

lm-eval-harness

MathematicsAnthropic Claude 4.8 Release

AIME 2024

95% pass@1

official_report

MathematicsAnthropic Claude 4.8 Release

Real-Time Provider Telemetry

Inference Latency & Generation Throughput

Empirical telemetry benchmarking generation throughput (Tokens/Second) and Time to First Token (TTFT).

Peak Generation Speed

68tokens/sec

Measured under concurrent production load

Lowest Time to First Token

440ms

p95 latency: 1240 ms

Telemetry Verification

99.95%uptime

Across 2,800 monitored requests

Production Trade-Offs

Architectural Strengths vs. Operational Considerations

An objective technical balance sheet analyzing deployment advantages and production constraints.

Operational Advantages

Key Architectural Strengths

Definitive high watermark for the Claude 4 architecture with 87.5% SWE-bench Verified resolution.
Lowered flagship pricing ($10 / $50 per 1M) with $1.00 cache reads.
500,000-token context window with up to 96,000 output tokens.

Production Constraints

Operational Considerations

Replaced in multimodal omni-agent workflows by Claude 5 Opus.

Technical Specifications

Hardware & Execution Parameters

Architecture Typehybrid-reasoning

Total ParametersProprietary

Attention MechanismSliding-Window

Context Window500,000 tokens

Max Output Tokens96,000 tokens

Supported Modalities

textimagepdf

License Typeproprietary

Commercial Use Allowed

Model DistillationProhibited

Zero Data RetentionAvailable

Knowledge Cutoff2026-03

Model Heritage & Evolutionary Lineage

Genealogical Provenance

The peak model of the Claude 4 family before the introduction of Claude 5.

Base Precursor

anthropic claude 4 7 opus 202604

Current Architecture

Claude Opus 4.8

Engineering Deep-Dive

Architecture Engineering & Capability Deep-Dive

Topology & Attention Mechanics

Represents the ultimate refinement of the dense hybrid-reasoning Claude 4 model family.

Evaluation Profile & Reasoning Capabilities

Pioneered multi-perspective hypothesis synthesis and automated peer-critique loops.

Inference Economics & Cost Optimization

Competitive $10 input pricing ensures widespread enterprise adoption across mission-critical workloads.

Primary Production Workloads & Suitability

Complex enterprise autonomous research systems

Zero-defect software verification and release management

Large-scale multi-document legal synthesis

Compute & Deployment Architecture

Cloud Deployment Architecture & Hardware Sizing

Cloud Deployment Architecture

Distributed enterprise serving infrastructure, autoscaling semantics, and runtime execution profile.

Cloud APIZero Local VRAM Required

Proprietary commercial model hosted on managed multi-region clusters with automatic autoscaling, high availability, and prompt prefix caching.

SLA: 99.9% Cloud Availability

Rate Limit: Scaled via Provider Quota

Cache: Automatic Prefix Compression

Serving Model

Multi-Tenant Cloud API

Continuous autoscaling with regional failover

Hardware Overhead

0 GB Local VRAM

Inference executed on hyperscaler accelerator clusters

Context Capacity

500k tokens

Supported with automated KV cache prefix compression

SDK Installation

$npm install @anthropic-ai/sdk

$pip install anthropic

Official Repositories & Papers

Announcement Blog Developer Docs OpenRouter API Google Scholar

Compare Showdowns

Generated completion & thinking tokens

Prompt Cache ReadUp to 80% Off

$1.00 / 1M

Re-used prompt prefix context

Monthly Production Cost Simulator

Daily Prompt Ingestion5M tokens/day (~150M/mo)

Daily Completion Generation1M tokens/day (~30M/mo)

Prompt Prefix Cache Hit Rate40%

Estimated Monthly Spend

$2,460.00

Includes prompt caching

Monthly Cache Savings

$npm install @anthropic-ai/sdk

$pip install anthropic

import Anthropic from '@anthropic-ai/sdk';

const anthropic = new Anthropic();
const msg = await anthropic.messages.create({
  model: 'claude-4-8-opus-20260521',
  max_tokens: 8192,
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Generate a comprehensive technical audit of our global payment ledger.' }],
});
console.log(msg.content);

Knowledge Base

Frequently Asked Questions about Claude Opus 4.8

Engineering specifications, VRAM sizing, commercial licensing terms, token economics, and empirical benchmark evaluations.

Claude Opus 4.8 supports 500,000 input tokens and up to 96,000 output tokens.

Verified Engineering FAQ

Back to Foundation Models Back to top ↑