Claude Opus 4.8

Claude Opus 4.8 launched May 28, 2026, building on Opus 4.7 with sharper autonomous judgment and longer independent work sessions at unchanged $5/$25 pricing. Its two signature additions were Fast Mode — roughly 2.5x faster inference at about a third of the previous cost for high-volume work — and Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code, which let the model generate orchestration scripts that spin up to 1,000 subagents in parallel for codebase-scale migrations.

It carries a 1M-token context window, 128K max output, and a January 2026 knowledge cutoff. Testers praised its honesty about its own progress and its tendency to flag uncertainties rather than let flaws slip by. In late 2026 it remains widely deployed as the stable fallback: cybersecurity prompts on newer models automatically route to Opus 4.8, and it sits at half the token price of the Fable tier. New projects generally start on Opus 5 or 5.5, but 4.8 is the safe default for cost-sensitive production.