Anthropic has just rolled out Claude Opus 4.1, positioning it as an enhanced iteration of the company’s premier AI model, with upgrades tailored to advanced programming, debugging, and analytic tasks. The updated AI model is now available to subscribers of Claude Pro and Claude Code, and can be accessed through the API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
Standout improvement in Opus 4.1
The most significant enhancement in Claude Opus 4.1 is its ability to perform complex coding tasks, such as analyzing multiple files, pinpointing intricate bugs, and conducting stepwise, agent-like problem-solving.
“Opus 4.1 advances our state-of-the-art coding performance… and improves Claude’s in-depth research and data analysis skills, especially around detail tracking and agentic search,” Anthropic stated in a blog post announcing the new release.
Feedback from early enterprise users suggests the improvements are more than just numbers. Rakuten Group engineers praised Opus 4.1 for delivering precise code corrections without introducing unnecessary changes or bugs.
Windsurf, a developer testing platform, noted that Opus 4.1 showed a full standard deviation better than Opus 4 on junior developer tasks — a performance boost compared to the leap from Claude Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4.
The model scores an impressive 74.5% on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark, which measures performance on real-world GitHub issues. That’s a notable jump from Opus 4, putting Claude 4.1 closer to the top of AI coding assistants.
GitHub Copilot integration expands reach
GitHub Copilot has added Claude Opus 4.1 to its available models for Enterprise and Pro+ plan subscribers. According to GitHub, this rollout allows users to choose Claude Opus 4.1 in GitHub Copilot Chat, including on Visual Studio Code, github.com, and GitHub Mobile.
“Claude Opus 4.1 will be available in GitHub Copilot Chat… [but] in Visual Studio Code, Opus 4.1 will only be available in ask mode,” GitHub confirmed.
Administrators of Copilot Enterprise must enable access via the newly updated model policy settings to make it available to teams. Claude Opus 4 will remain an option during a 15-day transition period before it is deprecated.
What this AI release means for developers
For developers already building with Claude, upgrading is straightforward: just switch the model identifier in your API to claude-opus-4-1-20250805.
Anthropic also encourages developers to explore Claude Opus 4.1’s improved problem-solving capabilities across multiple steps or interactions. Benchmarks like TAU-bench and Terminal-Bench suggest the model is now better at handling multi-turn, multi-step tasks, making it well-suited for building AI agents or process automation systems.
What’s the catch?
In today’s The Neuron newsletter, TechnologyAdvice writer Grant Harvey offered these points about Opus 4.1: “At $75 per million output tokens, it costs 5x more than Sonnet 4 (but that’s the same as current Opus 4). You’ll basically be paying for an AI that debugs like a senior engineer… up to you if that’s worth it!”
Also, check out The Neuron article written entirely with Claude Opus 4.1.
API access just got interesting. Anthropic’s recent Claude-related move could change how developers work across model boundaries.
