Anthropic just released its strongest lineup of artificial intelligence models so far, including Claude 4. This new release includes two variations: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. These large transformer models are in many ways a watershed moment in AI’s capabilities. From here, they can set their sights on more sophisticated work such as scholarly research or programming, moving the organization beyond its former focus on chatbot applications.
The recent launch coincides with the boom in Anthropic’s financial performance as well. That has served the company well, with first quarter gross revenues ramping to an impressive $2 billion annualized revenue run rate. This figure is more than double last year’s rate of $1 billion. The growth of customers spending more than $100k per year with Anthropic has absolutely exploded. It’s gone up 8 times over the same time last year. This expansion has been strengthened by a $2.5 billion, five-year revolving credit line that provides the company with even greater liquidity.
Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, emphasized the billions of dollars in training that went into creating these models. “We’ve been training these models since last year and really anticipating them,” he stated. Those training endeavors have resulted in the birth of Claude Opus 4. It’s being hailed as the “best coding model in the world.” This model is capable of working autonomously for nearly a full corporate workday—approximately seven hours—demonstrating its efficiency and potential for real-world application.
Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, shared details on how these new models have enhanced the user experience. He told us that in addition to Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, he often used the models as a “thinking partner.” He retained final control over everything, personally penning the vast majority of the words himself. As he’s pointed out, something has changed in the writing process with these new models.
“And they’ve crossed this threshold where now most of my writing is actually … Opus mostly, and it now is unrecognizable from my writing.” – Mike Krieger
Krieger was quick to note that these models are best when performing very specific, complicated tasks. Yet, they are still fraught with an intrinsic danger of going off-script. “The more complex the task is, the more risk there is that the model is going to kind of go off the rails … and we’re really focused on addressing that so that people can really delegate a lot of work at once to our models,” he explained.
The strategic pivot away from chatbots at the end of last year reflects Anthropic’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities. Krieger was particularly excited by the dual coding and agentic behavior advancements that these new models signify.
“I love that we’re kind of pushing the frontier on two sides. Like one is the coding piece and agentic behavior overall, and that’s powering a lot of these coding startups. … But then also, we’re pushing the frontier on how these models can actually learn from and then be a really useful writing partner, too.” – Mike Krieger
Anthropic is a revolutionary force, and that’s a good thing. With Amazon’s deep pockets behind them, they’re headed full steam ahead to chase their big dreams. Anthropic blends cutting edge technology with deepening fiscal power. All of this places the company in the driver’s seat as the AI landscape continues to change.