Here is a comparison for 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 (Output Tokens section):

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=claude-opus-4-7%2Cclau...

4.7 comes out slightly cheaper than 4.6. But 4.5 is about half the cost:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=claude-opus-4-7%2Cclau...

Notably the cost of reasoning has been cut almost in half from 4.6 to 4.7.

I'm not sure what that looks like for most people's workloads, i.e. what the cost breakdown looks like for Claude Code. I expect it's heavy on both input and reasoning, so I don't know how that balances out, now that input is more expensive and reasoning is cheaper.

On reasoning-heavy tasks, it might be cheaper. On tasks which don't require much reasoning, it's probably more expensive. (But for those, I would use Codex anyway ;)

I hit my 5 hour limit within 2 hours yesterday, initially I was trying the batched mode for a refactor but cancelled after seeing it take 30% of the limit within 5 minutes. Had to cancel and try a serial approach, consumed less (took ~50 minutes, xhigh effort, ~60% of the remaining allocation IIRC), but still very clearly consumed much faster than with 4.6.

It feels like every exchange takes ~5% of the 5 hour limit now, when it used to be maybe ~1-2%. For reference I'm on the Max 5x plan.

For now I can tolerate it since I still have plenty of headroom in my limits (used ~5% of my weekly, I don't use claude heavily every day so this is OK), but I hope they either offer more clarity on this or improve the situation. The effort setting is still a bit too opaque to really help.

And yes, Claude models are generally more fun to use than GPT/Codex. They have a personality. They have an intuition for design/aesthetics. Vibe-coding with them feels like playing a video game. But the result is almost always some version of cutting corners: tests removed to make the suite pass, duplicate code everywhere, wrong abstraction, type safety disabled, hard requirements ignored, etc.

These issues are not resolved in 4.7, no matter what the benchmarks say, and I don't think there is any interest in resolving them.

My workflow is to give the agent pretty fine-grained instructions, and I'm always fighting agents that insist on doing too much. Opus 4.5 is the best out of all agents I've tried at following the guidance to do only-what-is-needed-and-no-more.

Opus 4.6 takes longer, overthinks things and changes too much; the high-powered GPTs are similarly flawed. Other models such as Sonnet aren't nearly as good at discerning my intentions from less-than-perfectly-crafted prompts as Opus.

Eventually, I quit experimenting and just started using Opus 4.5 exclusively knowing this would all be different in a few months anyway. Opus cost more, but the value was there.

But now I see that 4.7 is going to replace both 4.5 and 4.6 in VSCode Copilot, and with a 7.5x modifier. Based on the description, this is going to be a price hike for slower performance — and if the 4.5 to 4.6 change is any guide, more overthinking targeted at long-running tasks, rather than fine-grained. For me, that seems like a step backwards.

After just ~4 prompts I blew past my daily limit. Another ~7 more prompts & I blew past my weekly limit.

The entire HTMl/CSS/JS was less than 300 lines of code.

I was shocked how fast it exhausted my usage limits.

After a few basic operations (retrospective look at the flow of recent reviews, product discussions) I would expect this to act like a senior member of the team, while 4.6 was good, but far more likely to be a foot-gun.

We'll be keeping an eye on open models (of which we already make good use of). I think that's the way forward. Actually it would be great if everybody would put more focus on open models, perhaps we can come up with something like the "linux/postgres/git/http/etc" of the LLMs: something we all can benefit from while it not being monopolized by a single billionarie company. Wouldn't it be nice if we don't need to pay for tokens? Paying for infra (servers, electricity) is already expensive enough

[Opus 4.6] 3% context | last: 5.2k in / 1.1k out

add this to .claude/settings.json

"statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "jq -r '\"[\\(.model.display_name)] \\(.context_window.used_percentage // 0)% context | last: \\(((.context_window.current_usage.input_tokens // 0) / 1000 * 10 | floor / 10))k in / \\(((.context_window.current_usage.output_tokens // 0) / 1000 * 10 | floor / 10))k out\"'" }

I'm surprised that it's 45%. Might go down (?) with longer context answers but still surprising. It can be more than 2x for small prompts.

I think people aren’t reading the system cards when they come out. They explicitly explain your workflow needs to change. They added more levels of effort and I see no mention of that in this post.

Did y’all forget Opus 4? That was not that long ago that Claude was essentially unusable then. We are peak wizardry right now and no one is talking positively. It’s all doom and gloom around here these days.

Is Opus 4.7 that significantly different in quality that it should use that much more in tokens?

I like Claude and Anthropic a lot, and hope it's just some weird quirk in their tokenizer or whatnot, just seems like something changed in the last few weeks and may be going in a less-value-for-money direction, with not much being said about it. But again, could just be some technical glitch.

Our default topology is a two-agent pair: one implementer and one reviewer. In practice, that usually means Opus writing code and Codex reviewing it.

I just finished a 10-hour run with 5 of these teams in parallel, plus a Codex run manager. Total swarm: 5 Opus 4.7 agents and 6 Codex/GPT-5.4 agents.

Opus was launched with:

`export CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE=35 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions --model 'claude-opus-4-7[1M]' --effort high --thinking-display summarized`

Codex was launched with:

`codex --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox --profile gpt-5-4-high`

What surprised me was usage: after 10 hours, both my Claude Code account and my Codex account had consumed 28% of their weekly capacity from that single run.

I expected Claude Code usage to be much higher. Instead, on these settings and for this workload, both platforms burned the same share of weekly budget.

So from this datapoint alone, I do not see an obvious usage-efficiency advantage in switching from Opus 4.7 to Codex/GPT-5.4.

First they introduce a policy to ban third party clients, but the way it's written, it affects claude -p too, and 3 months later, it's still confusing with no clarification.

Then they hide model's thinking, introduce a new flag which will still show summaries of thinking, which they break again in the next release, with a new flag.

Then they silently cut the usage limits to the point where the exact same usage that you're used to consumes 40% of your weekly quota in 5 hours, but not only they stay silent for entire 2 weeks - they actively gaslight users saying they didn't change anything, only to announce later that they did, indeed change the limits.

Then they serve a lobotomized model for an entire week before they drop 4.7, again, gaslighting users that they didn't do that.

And then this.

Anthropic has lost all credibility at this point and I will not be renewing my subscription. If they can't provide services under a price point, just increase the price or don't provide them.

EDIT: forgot "adaptive thinking", so add that too. Which essentially means "we decide when we can allocate resources for thinking tokens based on our capacity, or in other words - never".

To me this seems more that it's trained to be concise by default which I guess can be countered with preference instructions if required.

What's interesting to me is that they're using a new tokeniser. Does it mean they trained a new model from scratch? Used an existing model and further trained it with a swapped out tokeniser?

The looped model research / speculation is also quite interesting - if done right there's significant speed up / resource savings.

Not a secret, the model is the best on the world. Yet it is crazy expensive and this 35% is huge for us. $10,000 becomes $13,500. Don’t forget, anthropic tokenizer also shows way more than other providers.

We have experimented a lot with GLM 5.1. It is kinda close, but with downsides: no images, max 100K adequate context size and poor text writing. However, a great designer. So there is no replacement. We pray.

It's going to be a very expensive game, and the masses will be left with subpar local versions. It would be like if we reversed the democratization of compilers and coding tooling, done in the 90s and 00s, and the polished more capable tools are again all proprietary.

It was on the higher end of Anthropics range - closer to 30-40% more tokens

https://www.claudecodecamp.com/p/i-measured-claude-4-7-s-new...

Maybe I missed it, but it doesn’t tell you if it’s more successful for less overall cost?

I can easily make Sonnet 4.6 cost way more than any Opus model because while it’s cheaper per prompt it might take 10x more rounds (or never) solve a problem.

What I've been doing is running a dual-model setup — use the cheaper/faster model for the heavy lifting where quality variance doesn't matter much, and only route to the expensive one when the output is customer-facing and quality is non-negotiable. Cuts costs significantly without the user noticing any difference.

The real risk is that pricing like this pushes smaller builders toward open models or Chinese labs like Qwen, which I suspect isn't what Anthropic wants long term.

Having a taste of unnerfed Opus 4.6 I think that they have a conflict of interest - if they let models give the right answer first time, person will spend less time with it, spend less money, but if they make model artificially dumber (progressive reasoning if you will), people get frustrated but will spend more money.

It is likely happening because economics doesn't work. Running comparable model at comparable speed for an individual is prohibitively expensive. Now scale that to millions of users - something gotta give.

latest claude still fails the car wash test

In my opinion, we've reached some ceiling where more tokens lead only to incremental improvements. A conspiracy seems unlikely given all providers are still competing for customers and a 50% token drives infra costs up dramatically too.

The whole magic of (pre-nerfed) 4.6 was how it magically seemed to understand what I wanted, regardless of how perfectly I articulated it.

Now, Anth says that needing to explicitly define instructions are as a "feature"?!

Claude design on the other hand seemed to eat through (its own separate usage limit) very fast. Hit the limit this morning in about 45 mins on a max plan. I assume they are going to end up spinning that product off as a separate service.