Anthropic's Claude 4: Expert Analysis of the AI Revolution in Coding and Reasoning (Opus & Sonnet)

Announced on May 22, 2025, Anthropic's Claude 4 model family, featuring Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, marks a significant advancement in the field of generative artificial intelligence. These models stand out for their exceptional performance in coding, complex reasoning, and agentic capabilities, positioning Anthropic as a leading contender against OpenAI and Google. This reference article provides a detailed analysis of this new AI generation, its features, comparative performance, and potential impact.

The Claude 4 Announcement: A New Era for Generative AI

During the "Code with Claude" event on May 22, 2025, Anthropic officially unveiled its new Claude 4 model family. This announcement, following intense speculation since February 2025, immediately garnered significant interest. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers and notably backed by Amazon, thus confirms its strategy focused on AIs capable of executing complex tasks with increased autonomy and a strong commitment to safety.

Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's Chief Scientist, highlighted the scale of the technical challenge: "We've been training these models for the last year and have been really excited to get them out. I think these models are meaningfully more capable as agents and coders."

At the Heart of Claude 4: The Dynamic Duo Opus 4 and Sonnet 4

Claude 4 is available in two main models, each optimized for specific needs and use cases, offering remarkable flexibility to users and businesses.

Claude Opus 4: Cutting-Edge Intelligence for Complex Challenges

• Positioning and Capabilities: Described by Anthropic as the "world's best coding model," Claude Opus 4 is designed for long, arduous tasks requiring superior intelligence. It excels in advanced coding, complex reasoning, agentic research, and can operate autonomously for up to seven consecutive hours. Its memory is enhanced by local file access, enabling extensive context management.
• Target Audience: Professional users, enterprises seeking maximum performance for critical projects (available via Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans).
• Key Points:
  • Record performance on SWE-bench (72.5% in standard mode, 79.4% in "high compute").
  • Ability to manage development projects over several hours.
  • Ideal for R&D, complex financial analysis, and sophisticated AI agents.

Claude Sonnet 4: The Perfect Balance of Performance and Accessibility

• Positioning and Capabilities: Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade from Sonnet 3.7, offering an excellent balance of advanced capabilities, speed, and cost-effectiveness. Its coding performance rivals Opus 4 on certain benchmarks (72.7% on SWE-bench in standard mode, 80.2% in "high compute"). It features improved reasoning, precise instruction following, and a 65% reduction in "shortcuts" compared to Sonnet 3.7.
• Target Audience: Broad audience, including free users via the Claude app (claude.ai), and businesses for high-throughput uses requiring a responsive and reliable AI.
• Key Points:
  • Freely accessible to all users.
  • Excellent performance/cost ratio for daily and professional uses.
  • Suitable for assistants, rapid data analysis, and content generation.

Synthetic Comparison of Opus 4 and Sonnet 4

Revolutionary Capabilities: What Truly Distinguishes Claude 4

Beyond raw performance improvements, Claude 4 introduces a set of innovative features that significantly expand its scope and practical utility.

Autonomous Coding and Claude Code

Opus 4, and to a large extent Sonnet 4, demonstrate exceptional coding capabilities. Claude Code, now generally available, is an agentic tool that integrates with VS Code, JetBrains (beta), and GitHub Actions. It offers an extensible SDK to automate complex programming tasks, from code generation and refactoring to debugging. Opus 4's ability to manage development projects over several hours illustrates this shift towards greater autonomy.

Augmented Reasoning with "Extended Thinking"

Both models can engage in an iterative reasoning process, termed "extended thinking." They can use tools, such as web search (in beta), to refine their analyses and responses. For long processes, "thinking summaries" are provided for clarity, with a developer mode offering full access to the reasoning path. This approach allows Claude 4 to tackle problems requiring deliberation and in-depth exploration.

Advanced Tool Use and Code Execution

Claude 4 stands out for its ability to interact with external tools and execute code:

• Parallel Tool Execution: Enhances efficiency in managing multiple tasks involving different tools.
• Python Code Execution Tool (API): Enables Claude to produce computational results, data visualizations, and analyze datasets directly, without manual user intervention to run the code.
• Computer Use (Beta): A promising feature where Claude 4 can interact with a virtual desktop environment (controlling mouse, keyboard, screen captures) to automate digital tasks.
• MCP Connector (Model Context Protocol): Simplifies connection to remote MCP servers (e.g., Zapier, Asana) without requiring specific client-side code, facilitating third-party tool integration.

Enhanced Memory and Files API

Context and information management are crucial for complex tasks:

• Local File Access: Allows Claude to manage extended contexts by accessing user-provided files, thereby building "tacit knowledge" for continuous interactions.
• Files API: Simplifies document storage and access for persistent interactions, particularly useful for applications needing to work with large corpora.

Multimodal Understanding (Vision)

Claude 4 maintains and improves the vision capabilities introduced with Claude 3. It can analyze images (charts, graphs, photos) up to 5MB (API) or 10MB (claude.ai), supporting JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP formats. This opens the door to extracting information from visual sources.

Multilingual Proficiency

Claude 4 models exhibit high performance in numerous languages, often exceeding 95% of the English-language performance on benchmarks like MMLU. This ensures global reach and utility for a diverse user base.

Performance and Benchmarks: Claude 4 Against the Competition

Anthropic positions Claude 4 زيتleading on several benchmarks, particularly those evaluating coding and complex reasoning capabilities.

These figures, especially the high scores on SWE-bench (which assesses the ability to solve real-world software engineering problems), underscore Claude 4's power. Companies like Rakuten have validated Opus 4's robustness on seven-hour code refactoring tasks, confirming its endurance and reliability for large-scale projects.

The Claude 4 Ecosystem: Tools and Access for Developers

Anthropic is committed to facilitating the adoption of Claude 4 by the developer community:

• Multi-platform API Access: Available via Anthropic's API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI.
• Simplified Migration: Transitioning from Claude 3.7 is designed to be straightforward, with minimal changes required.
• Rich Documentation: Includes a Quickstart guide, API reference, prompt examples, an interactive Workbench, and a Cookbook on GitHub.
• New API Capabilities: The code execution tool, MCP connector, Files API, and prompt caching enrich development possibilities.

Concrete Use Cases and Early User Feedback

Initial uses and feedback highlight key applications:

• Software Development and Autonomous Coding: Code generation, debugging, refactoring, CI/CD pipeline automation.
• Complex Analysis and Research: Synthesis of vast data corpora, academic research, predictive financial analysis.
• Task Automation and AI Agents: Creation of customer service agents, advanced chatbots, business process automation (RPA).
• Visual Data Extraction: Analysis of graphs, document digitization, interpretation of complex images.

Summary of User Feedback (Mainly via X/Twitter):

• Positives:
  • Coding performance of Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 unanimously praised.
  • Accessibility of Sonnet 4 (free) highly appreciated.
  • Usefulness of "extended thinking" for complex tasks.
  • Prolonged autonomy of Opus 4 for development projects.
• Criticisms and Limitations:
  • Transparency of "extended thinking" can be limited without developer mode (which requires sales contact).
  • Improvable performance in ultra-specialized domains (medicine, law) compared to coding.
  • Integration complexity of Claude Code for non-developers.
  • Some free users of Sonnet 4 report hitting usage limits quickly.

Safety, Ethics, and Responsible AI: Anthropic's Commitment

True to its founding mission, Anthropic places a special emphasis on the safe and ethical development of AI:

• ASL-3 Safety Level: Acknowledgment of the models' power and the robust security measures needed, assessed by external experts.
• Constitutional AI: A unique approach to align models with predefined ethical principles (the "constitution") to guide their behavior.
• Usage Policy: Clarification of prohibited uses (e.g., election disinformation) and requirements for high-risk use cases.
• Data Privacy: Anthropic does not claim ownership of prompts or outputs generated via its API and does not use them to train its models without explicit consent.

Despite these efforts, managing potential biases, preventing abuse, and ensuring transparency of internal mechanisms (as illustrated by discussions on "system prompt" leaks) remain ongoing challenges for Anthropic and the entire industry.

Pricing and Availability: How to Access Claude 4?

• Claude.ai Interface:
  • Claude Sonnet 4: Free for all users.
  • Claude Opus 4: Included in paid plans (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise).
• API (per million tokens):
  • Claude Sonnet 4: Input $3 / Output $15.
  • Claude Opus 4: Input $15 / Output $75.
• Cloud Platforms: Available on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, offering flexible integration options for businesses.
• Cost Optimizations: Significant savings are possible via prompt caching (up to 90%) and batch processing (up to 50%).

Conclusion: Claude 4, A Giant Leap for AI and Its Prospects

Claude 4, with its flagship models Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, undeniably represents a major and strategic advancement in generative artificial intelligence. Exceptional coding performance, enhanced reasoning capabilities, and the introduction of innovative agentic features position Anthropic not merely as a follower, but as a technological leader capable of setting new standards.

While Claude Opus 4 establishes itself as the tool of choice for the most complex tasks and advanced software development, thanks particularly to its autonomy and depth of reasoning, Claude Sonnet 4 democratizes access to cutting-edge AI for a wide range of applications, blending performance with cost-effectiveness. Anthropic's continued commitment to safety and ethics, embodied by its Constitutional AI approach, remains a crucial differentiating factor in an ecosystem seeking trust.

The future of AI is being shaped by increasingly autonomous, capable, and integrated models in our work and creative processes. Claude 4 is an important milestone on this trajectory. Its adoption by developers and businesses, its evolution in the face of fierce competition, and the innovation it will inspire will be fascinating to watch. Anthropic actively encourages user feedback to help shape future AI generations, underscoring a collaborative approach for a responsible technological future.