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Anthropic slashes Claude Opus 4.8 pricing by 66% with model retirement

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

Anthropic is retiring the Claude Opus 4.1 model on August 5, 2026, and its replacement, Claude Opus 4.8, offers a significant price reduction. The new model is exactly one-third the cost across all pricing dimensions, with comparable or improved performance metrics such as context window size and maximum output. Users migrating from Opus 4.1 should note that Anthropic's documentation provides slightly different recommendations for the replacement model, with one page suggesting Opus 4.8 and another mentioning Claude Opus 5. Additionally, the term "retired" for Anthropic models does not always mean complete unavailability, as some older models remain accessible through specific cloud platforms like Google Cloud and Amazon Bedrock. AI

IMPACT Accelerates adoption of newer, more cost-effective models and highlights the importance of monitoring cloud platform availability for retired models.

RANK_REASON Product update from a major AI lab with significant pricing changes and implications for users. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Anthropic slashes Claude Opus 4.8 pricing by 66% with model retirement

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Product update from a major AI lab with significant pricing changes and implications for users. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
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model release, product
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High
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61 days old
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 English(EN) · Khavel ·

    Claude Opus 4.1 retires in a week — and its replacement is exactly 3x cheaper

    <p>If you have <code>claude-opus-4-1-20250805</code> hard-coded anywhere, you have until <strong>August 5, 2026</strong>. That is seven days from the day this went up.</p> <p>Anthropic deprecated it on June 5, 2026 and published a tentative retirement date of August 5. It is the …

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