Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7 with improved coding and vision, confirms it trails unreleased Mythos model

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 on Thursday, upgrading its flagship model with better coding performance, enhanced vision capabilities, and a new reasoning level. In an unusual move, the company publicly confirmed that Opus 4.7 does not match the performance of Mythos, its unreleased frontier model restricted to select cybersecurity and tech companies due to safety concerns.

Performance benchmarks

According to Anthropic's announcement, Opus 4.7 outperforms Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.4, and Google Gemini 3.1 Pro across multiple benchmarks. However, the company's own charts show Opus 4.7 trailing behind Mythos Preview, which has only been released to a handpicked group.

"Opus 4.7 is a notable improvement on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering, with particular gains on the most difficult tasks," Anthropic stated. "Users report being able to hand off their hardest coding work—the kind that previously needed close supervision—to Opus 4.7 with confidence."

Key improvements

The model features substantially better vision capabilities, processing images at higher resolution. Anthropic claims it produces higher-quality interfaces, slides, and documents with improved creative and professional output.

Anthropic introduced a new "xhigh" (extra high) effort level between the existing high and max settings, giving developers finer control over the tradeoff between reasoning depth and response latency. The company recommends starting with high or xhigh effort for coding and agentic use cases.

A new "task budgets" system is in testing, designed to give developers more control over Claude's reasoning process on longer tasks.

Context: User complaints and speculation

The release follows weeks of user complaints that Opus 4.6 had deteriorated in quality. An AMD senior director wrote in a widely shared GitHub post that "Claude has regressed to the point it cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering."

Speculation centered on whether Anthropic had deliberately scaled back the model—a practice users call "nerfing"—to control costs or redirect compute resources to Mythos and other frontier projects. Anthropic denied making changes to redirect computing resources.

Cybersecurity safeguards and Mythos path

Anthropic will use the Opus 4.7 release to test guardrails designed to prevent misuse for cybersecurity attacks. "What we learn from the real-world deployment of these safeguards will help us work towards our eventual goal of a broad release of Mythos-class models," the company stated.

What this means

By publicly acknowledging that Opus 4.7 trails Mythos, Anthropic is setting expectations while using its commercial release as a testbed for safety mechanisms needed for more capable systems. The new reasoning controls and task budgets suggest the company is focused on giving developers more granular control over performance-cost tradeoffs. The user complaints about Opus 4.6 degradation—and Anthropic's explicit response—highlight growing tensions between model capability, deployment costs, and user expectations in production AI systems.