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FlagshipAnthropic
Claude Opus 4.8
Claude Opus 4.8 is an Anthropic model in the Opus tier of the Claude family, accepting text and image input with a 1,000,000-token context window and tool calling support.
Context 1.0M
Tier Flagship
Knowledge Jan 2026
Tools Supported
Modalities text, image
Input from
$2.50 / 1M tokens
across 4 providers
API Pricing
Cheapest on Anthropic — 40% below avg| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Cached / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| $2.50 | $12.50 | $0.250 | |
| $2.50 | $12.50 | $0.250 | |
| $5.00 | $25.00 | - | |
| $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.500 | |
| $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.500 | |
| $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.500 |
Prices updated daily. Last check: Sep 8, 2026
Claude Opus 4.8 pricing by provider
Input, output, and batch rates, plus alternatives, for one provider at a time.
Performance & Benchmarks
Source: Artificial Analysis →Intelligence
47.8 / 100
Coding
74.3 / 100
Reasoning & Knowledge
- GPQA Diamond92.0%
- Humanity's Last Exam48.7%
Coding
- SciCode54.4%
Agentic & Tool Use
- Terminal-Bench Hard58.3%
- Terminal-Bench v2.184.6%
- τ²-bench94.4%
- τ-bench Banking34.2%
Instruction & Long Context
- IFBench62.2%
- Long-Context Reasoning77.7%
Benchmarks measured Sep 2026. Scores are independent evaluations, not vendor-reported.
Model Details
General
- Creator
- Anthropic
- Family
- Opus
- Tier
- Flagship
- Context Window
- 1.0M
- Knowledge Cutoff
- Jan 2026
- Modalities
- Text, Image
Capabilities
- Tool Calling
- Yes
- Open Source
- No
- Aliases
- claude-opus-4-8, Claude Opus 4.8, anthropic.claude-opus-4-8
Strengths & Limitations
Strengths
- 1,000,000-token context window, five times the 200K window of earlier Claude Opus generations
- Accepts image input in addition to text, supporting screenshots, scanned documents, charts, and diagrams
- Tool calling is supported, enabling function-calling loops and agent orchestration
- Opus-tier positioning targets complex reasoning and multi-step coding rather than high-volume throughput
- Knowledge cutoff recorded as January 2026, more recent than earlier Claude 4.x releases
- Available through multiple hosting routes, including Anthropic's API and cloud marketplace aliases such as anthropic.claude-opus-4-8
- Very large context reduces the need for aggressive chunking or retrieval preprocessing on long documents and codebases
Limitations
- Opus-tier models are typically the most expensive option within the Claude family — check the pricing table on this page
- Throughput and time-to-first-token are not populated in our benchmark data, so speed cannot be compared directly here
- Filling a large share of the 1M-token window increases per-request cost and generally raises latency
- Model weights are not distributed for self-hosting; access is through hosted APIs
- Knowledge cutoff of January 2026 means later events must be supplied via context or tools
Key Features
•1,000,000-token context window
•Text and image input (multimodal vision)
•Tool calling / function calling support
•Opus tier within the Claude model family
•Knowledge cutoff of January 2026
•Multiple provider aliases (claude-opus-4-8, anthropic.claude-opus-4-8)
•Long-document and whole-repository analysis in a single request
•Suitable for multi-step agentic workflows
About Claude Opus 4.8
Claude Opus 4.8 is a large language model from Anthropic, released as part of the Claude line. It sits in the Opus tier, the branch Anthropic positions above its Sonnet and Haiku tiers, and it continues the Opus 4.x series that began with Claude Opus 4 and Opus 4.1. As an Opus-tier release, it is aimed at workloads where response quality and multi-step reliability matter more than raw throughput or cost per token.
The model has a context window of 1,000,000 tokens, which is a notable increase over the 200K-token windows carried by earlier Claude Opus generations. It accepts both text and image input, so documents, screenshots, diagrams, and charts can be passed alongside prompts. Tool calling is supported, allowing the model to be wired into function-calling loops, retrieval systems, and agent frameworks. Our records list a knowledge cutoff of January 2026; anything after that date needs to be supplied in-context or via tools.
In practice, models at this tier are used for long-horizon coding work, research and document analysis over very large inputs, and agentic pipelines where a single mistake compounds across many steps. The million-token window is the main structural differentiator versus prior Opus releases — an entire repository, a long litigation record, or months of logs can be held in a single request rather than chunked. Anthropic also offers Sonnet-tier models for latency- and cost-sensitive deployments, and many teams route only the hardest requests to Opus. Throughput and time-to-first-token figures for Claude Opus 4.8 are not currently populated in our benchmark data, so compare provider-reported latency if speed is a constraint.
Common Use Cases
Claude Opus 4.8 fits workloads where the input is large and the reasoning chain is long: reviewing or refactoring code across many files, analyzing contracts, filings, or research corpora that run to hundreds of thousands of tokens, and driving agents that call tools repeatedly before producing a final answer. Image input makes it usable for mixed-media tasks such as reading scanned pages, interpreting charts inside reports, or working from UI screenshots during front-end debugging. Because Opus-tier models generally cost more per token than Sonnet or Haiku, a common pattern is tiered routing — a smaller Claude model handles classification, extraction, and routine chat, while Opus 4.8 is reserved for the requests that need the full million-token window or the hardest multi-step reasoning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Claude Opus 4.8 cost?
Pricing varies by provider and by pricing type — input tokens, output tokens, cached reads, and batch processing are typically billed at different rates, and long-context requests consume many more tokens per call. See the pricing table on this page for current rates across the providers we track.
What is Claude Opus 4.8 best used for?
It suits long-context and multi-step work: whole-repository code analysis and refactoring, review of large document sets, and agentic pipelines that chain many tool calls. The 1,000,000-token context window and image input make it a fit for tasks that would otherwise require heavy chunking or a separate OCR step.
How does Claude Opus 4.8 differ from earlier Claude Opus models?
The most concrete difference in our data is context length: Claude Opus 4.8 records a 1,000,000-token window, versus the 200K windows associated with earlier Opus 4.x releases. Its knowledge cutoff is also later, recorded as January 2026.
Does Claude Opus 4.8 support images and tool calling?
Yes. Our metadata lists text and image input modalities, and tool calling is supported, so the model can be used in function-calling and agent frameworks that pass images alongside text prompts.
Should I use Claude Opus 4.8 or a Sonnet-tier Claude model?
Opus-tier models are positioned for the hardest reasoning and longest-context tasks and generally carry higher per-token costs; Sonnet-tier models are the usual choice for latency- and volume-sensitive traffic. Many deployments route selectively, sending only requests that need the full context window or deep multi-step reasoning to Opus 4.8.
How fast is Claude Opus 4.8?
We do not currently have populated throughput or time-to-first-token figures for this model, so we cannot state output speed here. If latency matters, compare provider-reported numbers for the specific endpoint you plan to use, and note that large context fills typically increase time to first token.