Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8

Among Anthropic's chat and assistant lineup, this is positioned as the most capable generally available Opus model, sitting at the top of the family's stable releases. That placement matters for a concrete scenario: a team automating complex knowledge work can hand it text, image, and file inputs and rely on chain-of-thought reasoning to work through multi-step analysis, with the 1,000,000-token context window, larger than most models listed here, holding an entire project's documents in view. Function calling and structured JSON output make it usable as the reasoning core of an agent. On price it slots between siblings: at $5 per million input tokens it is above average for the category, but half the $10 rate of the fast-mode variant and the Fable line, while costing more than Claude Sonnet 5 at $2 per million. That frames it as the high-capability, standard-speed choice rather than the cheapest or the fastest. There is no free tier. It suits teams doing demanding research and writing who want top Opus-class capability without paying the fast-mode surcharge. Choose it when you need the family's strongest generally available reasoning at standard latency; opt for Sonnet 5 if budget leads, or the fast variant if response speed is the binding constraint.