Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 is here with 3X cheaper fast mode and near-Mythos level alignment

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 across its products and API at the same base price as 4.7.

Fast-mode pricing drops by about two-thirds, making high-throughput use much cheaper.

The model delivers modest benchmark gains, with stronger performance on coding and tool-use tasks.

A new feature can spawn hundreds of parallel subagents, aimed at large-scale agentic coding workflows.

Claude Opus 4.8 still sits below the more advanced Claude Mythos Preview, which will expand after further safety work.