Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.1

Anthropic:

GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases without making unnecessary adjustments or introducing bugs, with their team preferring this precision for everyday debugging tasks. Windsurf reports Opus 4.1 delivers a one standard deviation improvement over Opus 4 on their junior developer benchmark, showing roughly the same performance leap as the jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4.

Nothing spectacular here, but incremental improvements add up. Mike Krieger — best known as a co-founder of Instagram, now chief product officer at Anthropic — in an interview with Bloomberg:

“In the past, we were too focused on only shipping the really big upgrades,” said Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger. “It’s better at coding, better at reasoning, better at agentic tasks. We’re just making it better for people.” [...]

“One thing I’ve learned, especially in AI as it’s moving quickly, is that we can focus on what we have — and what other folks are going to do is ultimately up to them,” Krieger said when asked about OpenAI’s upcoming release. “We’ll see what ends up happening on the OpenAI side, but for us, we really just focused on what can we deliver for the customers we have.”

I’m on board with the idea that Apple need not acquire any of these AI startups, but if they do, Anthropic — not Perplexity — seems the one most aligned with Apple’s values. And I don’t mean values in just an ethical sense, but their entire approach to product development in general.

★ Tuesday, 5 August 2025