Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 is here, and the headline change is context: a new 1‑million‑token default window aimed squarely at complex, multi‑file coding work. It lands as Claude Code — Anthropic’s AI coding assistant — drives much of the company’s momentum.
A million‑token default matters for developers because it means the model can hold an entire codebase, long specs and test output in working memory at once, instead of being fed code in small slices and losing the thread.
Our take
The model race has shifted from “who sounds smartest” to “who is most useful inside real workflows,” and coding is where that’s clearest. Anthropic leaning into long‑context coding — while Microsoft and Google ship their own code models — sets up the most competitive stretch the category has seen.
If you’re picking a day‑to‑day coding assistant, we put the leaders through real tasks in our guide to the best AI coding tools, and compare the two most popular assistants directly in ChatGPT vs Claude.
Source: Anthropic.
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