Snapshot of what's shipped from Anthropic over the past several weeks. Fast-moving space — treat dates as the anchor and expect this to go stale within a month or two, similar to the caveat in [[AI model comparison (July 2026)]]. ## New models **Claude Opus 5** (released July 24, 2026) is the big one. Anthropic is pitching it as near-frontier intelligence at roughly half the cost of Claude Fable 5. Highlights from the announcement: - More than doubles Opus 4.8's score on Frontier-Bench v0.1 (software engineering) - Within 0.5% of Fable 5 on CursorBench 3.2, at half the cost - 3x the next-best model on ARC-AGI 3 (novel problem-solving) - Beats Fable 5 on OSWorld 2.0 at about a third of the cost - Notable jumps in life-sciences tasks (organic chemistry, protein tasks) - New effort-level toggle: dial between "optimize for intelligence" and "conserve tokens for faster/cheaper" - Pricing unchanged from Opus 4.8: $5/$25 per million tokens (input/output); Fast Mode available at 2.5x speed, 2x price - Anthropic reports it has the lowest misalignment score of recent models **Claude Sonnet 5** (released June 30, 2026, so just before this note's window, but the pricing news is fresh) — pitched as "the most agentic Sonnet yet," narrowing the gap to Opus 4.8 while staying cheaper. As of August 10, 2026, the introductory pricing of $2/$10 per million tokens became permanent — the planned September 1 price increase was cancelled. Worth noting: the updated tokenizer means token counts don't map 1:1 to older models (roughly 1.0–1.35x depending on content). ## Claude Code Steady weekly-ish point releases through early-to-mid August, worth flagging if you use it day to day (see [[Claude Code - Interactive Mode]] and [[Claude Reference - Keyboard shortcuts, input modes, etc.]] for the existing reference notes): - **Cross-session messaging** — sessions can now message each other via @-mentions (shipped Aug 7, expanded Aug 14) - **Default subagent forking** and improved session naming (Aug 14) - **Self-hosted environments for cloud sessions** (beta, Aug 7) and faster self-hosted runner starts (Aug 15) - **Auto mode** is now the default for new CLI sessions (Aug 7) - **GitLab merge request support** broadened (Aug 14–15) - Various fixes: MCP OAuth sign-in for pre-registered clients (Slack etc.), Git detection, session sync, memory cleanup ## Cowork - **Chrome side panel** now runs shared Cowork sessions — conversations, skills, and connectors persist across desktop, web, and mobile (Aug 12) - Ties into what's already in [[Claude cowork]] on availability/positioning — this is more about session continuity across surfaces than a new capability ## Platform / enterprise - **Compliance API** expanded to beta support for retrieving Cowork and Claude Code session transcripts, for Enterprise orgs (Aug 11) - **Managed Agents** got session budgets, advisor model support, inference geo-pinning, and GitHub-based skill discovery (Aug 7) - **Claude Tag** (Slack integration) now reads full channel context — Anthropic claims ~30% better at deciding when to proactively respond — and uses memory/standing instructions (Aug 13) ## Safety / policy - **Text watermarking** introduced for EU AI Act compliance — embeds an undetectable pattern in "low-stakes" word choices to prove Claude authorship without touching quality or cost (Aug 14) - Additional safeguards for Fable 5's biology capabilities (Aug 7) - Position statement on open-weight models (Jul 27) - Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar joined as Chief Global Affairs Officer (Aug 4) ## Take Opus 5 is the headline — it's the first Opus release in a while that reads as a real capability jump rather than an incremental point release, and the cost/capability toggle is a genuinely useful new lever rather than marketing. The Sonnet 5 pricing lock-in is good news if you're budgeting API costs. Everything else this cycle is fit-and-finish on Claude Code and Cowork (session continuity, enterprise compliance, agentic messaging) rather than new frontier capability. Sources: [Introducing Claude Opus 5](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5), [Introducing Claude Sonnet 5](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5), [Anthropic news](https://www.anthropic.com/news), [Anthropic release notes — Releasebot](https://releasebot.io/updates/anthropic), [Claude Code updates — Releasebot](https://releasebot.io/updates/anthropic/claude-code)