Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.5: The New King of AI Coding – Full Breakdown and Benchmarks

By AI News Hub Staff | November 25, 2025

In the ever-escalating AI arms race, Anthropic just dropped a bombshell. Today, November 24, 2025, the company behind Claude unveiled Claude Opus 4.5, positioning it as the world's most advanced model for coding, agentic tasks, and real-world computer use. Coming hot on the heels of Google's Gemini 3 Pro release just a week ago on November 18, this launch intensifies the battle for AI supremacy. Opus 4.5 isn't just an incremental upgrade, it's a paradigm shift, excelling in software engineering benchmarks, creative problem-solving, and safety robustness.

If you're a developer, researcher, or AI enthusiast wondering what is Claude Opus 4.5 and how it stacks up against rivals like Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.1, and more, this comprehensive guide has you covered. We'll dive into the key features, benchmark showdowns (including a dedicated Gemini 3 Pro vs Claude Opus 4.5 section), pricing, safety measures, and what this means for the future of AI. Let's break it down.

What is Claude Opus 4.5? A Quick Overview

Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic's flagship large language model (LLM), succeeding the already impressive Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4.5. Built on a foundation of constitutional AI principles, it emphasises helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness while pushing boundaries in practical intelligence.

Key highlights from the official Anthropic announcement:

• Availability: Live now on Anthropic's apps, API, and major cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure). Developers can access it via claude-opus-4-5-20251101 in the Claude API.

• Pricing: $5 per million input tokens / $25 per million output tokens, a dramatic reduction from the $15/$75 rates for Claude Opus 4.1, making high-end capabilities more affordable than ever.

• Core Strengths: Dominates in coding, multi-agent systems, vision, reasoning, and multilingual tasks. It's designed for "everyday" workflows like debugging multi-system bugs, deep research, and manipulating spreadsheets or slides.
  

Technical Specifications:

• 200,000 token context window, 64,000 token output limit, and a March 2025 reliable knowledge cutoff

• Enhanced computer use features including a new zoom tool for screen inspection

• Thinking blocks from previous assistant turns are preserved in model context by default, a significant improvement over previous Anthropic models
  

Anthropic's internal testers raved: Opus 4.5 "handles ambiguity and reasons about tradeoffs without hand-holding." Early customer feedback echoes this, with one engineering team noting it aced a gruelling take-home exam faster and better than top human candidates.

But what sets it apart? Let's zoom in on the benchmarks that prove its mettle.

Opus 4.5 Outperforms Human Candidates on Engineering Exam

In one of the most striking demonstrations of Opus 4.5's capabilities, the model scored higher on Anthropic's most challenging internal engineering assessment than any human job candidate in the company's history. The test, which focuses on technical ability with a two-hour time limit, demonstrated the model's exceptional capabilities, though Anthropic was careful to note it measures only technical skills under time pressure, not collaboration or long-term judgment.

This achievement isn't just about raw capability; it signals a fundamental shift in what AI can accomplish in professional software engineering contexts. As Alex Albert, Anthropic's head of developer relations, put it: "The model just gets it."

Claude Opus 4.5 Benchmarks: Crushing the Competition in Coding and Agents

Anthropic didn't hold back on the data. Opus 4.5 sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) records across software engineering, tool use, and reasoning evals. Here's a snapshot from their release, compared to predecessors and rivals (Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.1). We've pulled these directly from the announcement for transparency.

Benchmark	Claude Opus 4.5	Sonnet 4.5	Opus 4.1	Gemini 3 Pro	GPT-5.1	Notes
Agentic Coding	80.9%	77.2%	74.5%	76.2%	76.3%	SWE-bench Verified
Agentic Terminal	59.3%	50.0%	46.5%	54.2%	58.1%	Terminal-bench 2.0
Agentic Tool Use	88.9%	86.2%	86.8%	85.3%	-	Retail
Synthetic Tool Use	98.2%	98.0%	71.5%	98.0%	-	Telecom
Scaled Tool Use	62.3%	43.8%	40.9%	-	-	MCP Atlas
Computer Use	66.3%	61.4%	44.4%	-	-	OSWorld
Novel Problem	37.6%	13.6%	-	31.1%	17.6%	ARC-AGI (Verified)
Graduate-level Q&A	87.0%	83.4%	81.0%	91.9%	88.1%	GPQA Diamond
Visual Reasoning	80.7%	77.8%	77.1%	-	85.4%	MMU (Validation)
Multilingual Q&A	90.8%	89.1%	88.5%	91.8%	91.0%	MMLU

Standout Wins for Opus 4.5:

• Coding Supremacy: Tops SWE-bench Verified at 80.9%, outpacing Gemini 3 Pro (76.2%) and GPT-5.1 (76.3%). This marks a notable advance over OpenAI's GPT-5.1-Codex-Max state-of-the-art model, which was released just five days earlier. It leads in 7/8 languages on SWE-bench Multilingual.

• Agentic Prowess: In τ²-bench (a multi-turn agent eval), Opus 4.5 creatively navigates constraints—like upgrading a flight cabin to enable modifications—solving "impossible" scenarios where others fail.

• Efficiency Edge: At a medium effort level, Opus 4.5 matches Sonnet 4.5's best score on SWE-bench Verified while using 76% fewer output tokens; at the highest effort level, it exceeds Sonnet 4.5 performance by 4.3 percentage points while still using 48% fewer tokens

• Broader Gains: Jumps 24 points on ARC-AGI (novel problems) and excels in vision/math, making it a versatile powerhouse.
  

These aren't cherry-picked; they're from rigorous, third-party-verified tests. Opus 4.5 isn't just smarter—it's more efficient, using fewer resources for superior results.

Gemini 3 Pro vs Claude Opus 4.5: Head-to-Head in the AI Coding Wars

Opus 4.5 writes better code, leading across 7 out of 8 programming languages on SWE-bench Multilingual.

Google's Gemini 3 Pro, launched on November 18, 2025, as part of the Gemini 3 series, was billed as the "best model for multimodal understanding" and agentic coding. With its 1M token context window and "vibe coding" focus (generating code from intuitive prompts), it promised less user hand-holding and richer visualizations. Available in the Gemini app, Vertex AI, and more, it's Google's shot at dethroning OpenAI and Anthropic.

But does it hold up against Claude Opus 4.5? Based on the benchmarks above (sourced from Anthropic's release, cross-referenced with Google's claims), here's a detailed Gemini 3 Pro vs Claude Opus 4.5 comparison across key categories:

1. Coding and Software Engineering

• Winner: Claude Opus 4.5. It crushes SWE-bench Verified (80.9% vs. 76.2%) and Terminal-bench 2.0 (59.3% vs. 54.2%). Gemini 3 Pro shines in "vibe coding" for creative devs, but Opus edges out in verified, real-world bug-fixing—vital for enterprise teams.

• Why? Opus's multi-agent coordination and context compaction let it handle complex repos better, boosting deep research by 15 points in internal tests.
  

2. Agentic and Tool Use

• Winner: Claude Opus 4.5. Scores 88.9% on Agentic Tool Use (Retail) vs. Gemini's 85.3%, and 98.2% on Synthetic Tool Use (Telecom) matching but not exceeding Opus's precision. Gemini's "generative interfaces" (e.g., magazine-style outputs) are flashy, but Opus's creative loophole-finding (like the airline scenario) shows deeper reasoning.

• Edge Case: Gemini handles multimodal agents (text+video) slightly better in unbenchmarked areas, per Google's demos.

  
  

3. Reasoning and Novel Problems

• Tie, with Gemini Slight Edge in Q&A. Gemini leads GPQA Diamond (91.9% vs. 87.0%) and MMLU (91.8% vs. 90.8%), thanks to its "Deep Think" mode. However, Opus dominates ARC-AGI (37.6% vs. 31.1%), proving superior at unseen puzzles—crucial for AGI progress.

• Multimodal: Gemini's video/audio prowess gives it a nod here (unbenchmarked), but Opus's 80.7% on MMU (Visual Reasoning) closes the gap.
  

4. Efficiency and Accessibility

• Winner: Claude Opus 4.5. Cheaper tokens ($5/$25 vs. Gemini's enterprise pricing, starting higher in Vertex AI) and the effort parameter make it nimbler. Gemini's 1M context is massive, but Opus's token savings (up to 76% fewer) win for production.
  

5. Safety and Alignment

“concerning behavior” scores measure a very wide range of misaligned behavior, including both cooperation with human misuse and undesirable actions that the model takes at its own initiative

• Winner: Claude Opus 4.5. Anthropic's constitutional AI yields the lowest "concerning behavior" scores and top prompt injection resistance (via Gray Swan benchmarks). Gemini 3 underwent extensive evals but trails in misuse cooperation metrics.
  

Overall Verdict: Claude Opus 4.5 takes the crown for coding and agents, the hottest battlegrounds right now; making it the go-to for developers. Gemini 3 Pro fights back with multimodal flair and broad accessibility, ideal for creative/enterprise workflows. If you're building agents or debugging code, bet on Opus. For vibe-based ideation? Gemini's your vibe.

Major Integration: Claude Opus 4.5 Joins Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot

In a strategic partnership announced simultaneously with the Opus 4.5 release, Anthropic made the model available in Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot paid plans, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. This expands Claude's reach into millions of developers' workflows.

GitHub Copilot Integration Details:

• Available to Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise users at a promotional 1x premium request multiplier through December 5, 2025

• Opus 4.5 is rolling out as the default model for Copilot coding agent when enabled

• Early testing shows it surpasses internal coding benchmarks while cutting token usage in half, making it especially well-suited for tasks like code migration and code refactoring
  

This integration puts Claude directly into VS Code alongside GPT models, giving developers unprecedented choice in their AI coding assistants. GitHub's chief product officer, Mario Rodriguez, emphasized the significance of this integration, noting the model's exceptional efficiency and suitability for professional development settings.

Microsoft Foundry Benefits: Building on the Microsoft Ignite announcement of the expanded partnership with Anthropic, Microsoft Foundry delivers on its commitment to giving Azure customers immediate access to the widest selection of advanced and frontier AI models of any cloud. This enables seamless deployment, integration, and scaling for AI apps and agents across the enterprise.

Real-World Customer Feedback: Beyond the Benchmarks

Early customers are reporting transformative results that go beyond benchmark numbers:

Rakuten (Japanese E-commerce Giant): Rakuten's general manager of AI for business, Yusuke Kaji, reported that their agents using Opus 4.5 "were able to autonomously refine their own capabilities—achieving peak performance in 4 iterations while other models couldn't match that quality after 10". This demonstrates the model's ability to improve through iterative learning without weight updates—a form of meta-learning that's unprecedented at this scale.

Notion: Notion found that "Opus 4.5 excels at interpreting what users actually want, producing shareable content on the first try. Combined with its speed, token efficiency, and surprisingly low cost, it's the first time we're making Opus available in Notion Agent". The model's ability to understand user intent has unlocked entirely new use cases for their agent platform.

Lovable: Claude Opus 4.5 delivers frontier reasoning within Lovable's chat mode, where users plan and iterate on projects, with its reasoning depth transforming planning—and great planning makes code generation even better. The improvement in planning capabilities cascades through the entire development workflow.

Manus AI: Tao Zhang, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Manus AI, stated: "Manus deeply utilizes Anthropic's Claude models because of their strong capabilities in coding and long-horizon task planning, together with their prowess to handle agentic tasks. We are very excited to be using them now on Microsoft Foundry!"

Replit: Michele Catasta, President of Replit, shared: "We're excited to use Anthropic Claude models from Microsoft Foundry. Having Claude's advanced reasoning alongside GPT models in one platform gives us flexibility to build scalable, enterprise-grade workflows that move far beyond prototypes"

Enterprise Use Cases: Anonymous customers reported significant improvements:

• Excel automation and financial modeling saw 20% accuracy improvement and 15% efficiency gains, with complex tasks that once seemed out of reach becoming achievable

• Long-context storytelling excels at generating 10-15 page chapters with strong organization and consistency, unlocking use cases that couldn't be reliably delivered before

• Long-horizon coding tasks show higher pass rates on held-out tests while using up to 65% fewer tokens, giving developers real cost control without sacrificing quality
  

Developer Experience: A Weekend with Opus 4.5

Developer Simon Willison, who had preview access, spent a weekend with Opus 4.5 in Claude Code, resulting in a new alpha release of sqlite-utils that included several large-scale refactoring. Opus 4.5 was responsible for most of the work across 20 commits, 39 files changed, 2,022 additions and 1,173 deletions in a two day period.

His verdict? "It's clearly an excellent new model." Willison's experience demonstrates Opus 4.5's ability to handle complex, multi-file refactoring tasks that would typically take human developers days or weeks to complete and compressed into a single weekend working session.

Product Updates: Smarter Tools for Developers and Users

Opus 4.5 isn't launching in a vacuum, Anthropic rolled out ecosystem boosts:

Claude Developer Platform:

• Effort control for token efficiency with fine-grained API parameters

• Advanced sub-agent management for multi-agent systems

• Programmatic tool calling, which allows Claude to write and execute code that invokes functions directly
  

Claude Code:

• Updated "Plan Mode" that builds more precise plans and executes more thoroughly. Claude asks clarifying questions upfront, then builds a user-editable plan.md file before executing

• Now available in the desktop app for the first time, enabling developers to run multiple AI agent sessions in parallel. Perhaps one agent fixes bugs while another researches GitHub and a third updates documentation

• Automatic context compaction works in chats to maintain long conversations
  

Consumer Apps:

• Lengthy conversations no longer hit a wall. Claude automatically summarizes earlier parts of a conversation to allow more room for continuing the chat without hitting limits

• Claude for Chrome now available to all Max users, letting Claude handle tasks across browser tabs

• Claude for Excel expanded to all Max, Team, and Enterprise users (announced in October, now broadly accessible)
  

Usage Improvements: Opus-specific caps have been removed for Claude and Claude Code users with access to Opus 4.5, and overall usage limits have increased for Max and Team Premium members. Max users now get as much Opus usage as they previously had for Sonnet, a significant upgrade. These make Opus 4.5 a seamless fit for daily work, from Excel automation to browser-tab orchestration.

Safety First: Why Opus 4.5 is the Most Aligned Frontier Model

Anthropic's safety obsession shines. Claude Opus 4.5 is the most robustly aligned model Anthropic has released to date and, they suspect, the best-aligned frontier model by any developer. It scores lowest on "concerning behaviors" (misuse cooperation, initiative harms) and resists prompt injections better than any rival.

The company states: With Opus 4.5, substantial progress has been made in robustness against prompt injection attacks, which smuggle in deceptive instructions to fool the model into harmful behavior. Opus 4.5 is harder to trick with prompt injection than any other frontier model in the industry.

Their system card details evals for reward hacking, ensuring creative wins (like the airline fix) stay helpful, not misaligned. The benchmark technically scored the airline scenario as a failure because Claude's creative solution was unanticipated but this kind of problem-solving within constraints is exactly what makes it valuable for real-world applications.

As AI integrates into critical tasks, this robustness matters—especially against hackers and adversarial attacks. The model's alignment improvements continue Anthropic's trend toward safer frontier models.

Anthropic's Explosive Growth Trajectory

The Opus 4.5 release comes as Anthropic experiences explosive growth that few companies in history have matched:

• Run-rate revenue grew from approximately $1 billion at the beginning of 2025 to over $5 billion by August 2025, making Anthropic one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history

• The company now serves over 300,000 business customers, with large accounts (over $100,000 in run-rate revenue) growing nearly 7x in the past year

• The number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually jumped eightfold year-over-year
  

Looking Ahead: Anthropic is reportedly on track to meet a goal of $9 billion in ARR by the end of 2025 and has set a target of $20 billion to $26 billion ARR for 2026. These projections, if realized, would put Anthropic on a trajectory to rival OpenAI's enterprise dominance while maintaining its distinct focus on safety and alignment.

The company raised $13 billion in Series F funding in September 2025, valuing it at $183 billion post-money, a testament to investor confidence in its approach and growth potential.

What This Means for Developers: Practical Implications

Immediate Actions:

1. API Migration: Switch to claude-opus-4-5-20251101 for production workloads that demand highest quality. The model identifier is live across all major cloud platforms.

2. Cost Optimization: The efficiency gains are real. At a medium effort level, Opus 4.5 matches Sonnet 4.5's best score on SWE-bench Verified while using 76% fewer output tokens; at highest effort, it exceeds Sonnet 4.5 performance by 4.3 percentage points while still using 48% fewer tokens. This means you can get better results while spending less.

3. Try GitHub Copilot: Enable Opus 4.5 during the promotional period (through December 5, 2025) when it's priced at just 1x premium request multiplier—effectively the same as standard models.

4. Explore Microsoft Foundry: If you're an Azure customer, Claude Opus 4.5 is available now with enterprise-grade security and governance built in.
   

Use Cases Where Opus 4.5 Excels:

• Multi-day software development projects compressed to hours with autonomous execution

• Complex debugging across multiple interconnected systems with minimal hand-holding

• Long-horizon autonomous tasks requiring sustained reasoning and multi-step execution

• Financial modeling and Excel automation (20% accuracy improvement reported by enterprise customers)

• Multi-agent orchestration where different AI agents need to coordinate on complex workflows

• Code migration and refactoring at scale, as demonstrated in GitHub Copilot integration

• Deep research that requires synthesizing information across multiple sources and formats

• Document and presentation creation with professional polish and domain awareness

When to Use Opus 4.5 vs. Sonnet 4.5:

As Alex Albert noted, this release "enables this new tier of possibilities." You now have three models that fit different needs:

• Haiku 4.5: Fast, cost-effective for simpler tasks

• Sonnet 4.5: Excellent balance for everyday coding and moderate complexity

• Opus 4.5: Premium tier for use cases no prior model has solved and where performance matters most

The Competitive Landscape: A Three-Way Race

The rapid-fire releases of November 2025 have created an unprecedented competitive dynamic:

• November 18: Google launches Gemini 3 Pro

• November 19: OpenAI releases GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

• November 24: Anthropic drops Claude Opus 4.5

  
  

This intensity reflects the high stakes in the AI coding market. With Claude Code already generating over $500 million in run-rate revenue with usage growing more than 10x in just three months, and GitHub Copilot representing a massive developer market, each percentage point of benchmark improvement translates to real competitive advantage.

The models are converging in capability; single-digit percentage differences on benchmarks but diverging in philosophy:

• Anthropic prioritizes safety, alignment, and enterprise reliability

• OpenAI focuses on scale, broad consumer adoption, and multimodal capabilities

• Google leverages its search infrastructure and multimodal strengths

  
  

For developers, this competition is a win: more choices, better prices, and rapid innovation cycles.

FAQs About Claude Opus 4.5

What is Claude Opus 4.5?

Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic's most advanced AI model released on November 24, 2025. It's specifically designed for coding, AI agents, and computer use tasks. The model excels at software engineering, debugging complex systems, and handling long-running autonomous tasks with minimal supervision.

How much does Claude Opus 4.5 cost?

Claude Opus 4.5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. This is 67% cheaper than the previous Opus 4.1 model, which cost $15/$75 per million tokens. The lower pricing makes premium AI capabilities accessible to more developers and businesses.

Can I use Claude Opus 4.5 in GitHub Copilot?

Yes. Claude Opus 4.5 is available in GitHub Copilot for Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise users. Until December 5, 2025, it's offered at a promotional 1x premium request multiplier, making it the same price as standard models during this period.

What is the context window for Claude Opus 4.5?

Claude Opus 4.5 has a 200,000 token context window with a 64,000 token output limit. This allows it to process large codebases, lengthy documents, and complex multi-file projects while maintaining coherence throughout the conversation.

What programming languages does Claude Opus 4.5 support?

Claude Opus 4.5 supports all major programming languages and leads in 7 out of 8 languages on SWE-bench Multilingual benchmark. It excels particularly in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C++, Go, Rust, and other widely used languages.

How does Claude Opus 4.5 compare to Gemini 3 Pro?

Claude Opus 4.5 leads in coding (80.9% vs 76.2% on SWE-bench) and agentic tasks (88.9% vs 85.3% on tool use). Gemini 3 Pro has advantages in multimodal understanding and handles video/audio better. For coding and agents, Opus 4.5 is superior. For creative multimodal work, Gemini 3 Pro may be preferable.

Final Thoughts: Claude Opus 4.5 Redefines AI Workflows

Claude Opus 4.5 isn't hype, it's a tangible leap, outcoding humans on tough exams and outsmarting benchmarks with creative problem-solving that shows genuine intelligence. In the Gemini 3 Pro vs Claude Opus 4.5 showdown, Anthropic's laser focus on coding and agents gives it the edge for developer workflows, but Google's multimodal push keeps the rivalry fierce and pushes everyone to improve faster.

The simultaneous launch with Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot integration shows Anthropic's maturation from research lab to enterprise AI platform. The explosive revenue growth from $1B to $5B in eight months, validates that businesses are betting on Claude for their most critical AI workloads.

For developers: Jump in via the API today using claude-opus-4-5-20251101. Try it in GitHub Copilot during the promotional period. The combination of superior performance and 67% price reduction makes this a no-brainer for serious development work.

For businesses: Expect productivity surges in coding, research, and document automation. The real-world customer testimonials from companies like Rakuten and Notion show measurable impact, not just benchmark wins.

For the industry: The AI race isn't just heating up, it's reached a fever pitch. With three major releases in one week, we're seeing the fastest innovation cycle in AI history. And based on the trajectory, it's only going to accelerate.

The era of AI agents that can genuinely "get it" and work autonomously on complex, multi-day projects has arrived. Claude Opus 4.5 is leading that charge.

What do you think Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3 Pro for your stack? Have you tried the new model yet? Drop a comment below! Follow AI News Hub for daily updates on Claude, Gemini, GPT, and the latest in AI innovation.

Sources:

• Anthropic official blog (Nov 24, 2025)

• Google DeepMind blog (Nov 18, 2025)

• GitHub Copilot changelog (Nov 24, 2025)

• Microsoft Azure blog (Nov 24, 2025)

• VentureBeat AI coverage (Nov 24, 2025)

• The New Stack analysis (Nov 24, 2025)

• Simon Willison's blog (Nov 24, 2025)