Anthropic has today released a new, improved Claude model, Opus 4.7, but has deliberately built it to be less capable than the highly-anticipated Claude Mythos.

Anthropic calls Opus 4.7 a “notable improvement” over Opus 4.6, offering advanced software engineering capabilities and improved visioning, memory, instruction-following, and financial analysis.

However, the yet-to-be-released (and inadvertently leaked) Mythos seems to overshadow the Opus 4.7 release. Interestingly, Anthropic itself is downplaying Opus 4.7 to an extent, calling it “not as advanced” and “less broadly capable” than the Claude Mythos Preview.

The Opus upgrade also comes on the heels of the launch of Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s security initiative that uses Claude Mythos Preview to identify and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

“For once in technological history, a product is being released with a marketing message that is focused more on what it does not do than on what it does,” said technology analyst Carmi Levy. “Anthropic’s messaging makes it clear that Opus 4.7 is a safer model, with capabilities that are deliberately dialed down compared to Mythos.”

‘Not fully ideal’ in some safety scenarios

Anthropic touts Opus 4.7’s “substantially better” instruction-following compared to Opus 4.6, its ability to handle complex, long-running tasks, and the “precise attention” it pays to instructions. Users report that they’re able to hand off their “hardest coding work” to the model, whose memory is better than that of prior versions. It can remember notes across long, multi-session work and apply them to new tasks, thus requiring less up-front context.

Opus 4.7 has 3x more vision capabilities than prior models, Anthropic said, accepting high-resolution images of up to 2,576 pixels. This allows the model to support multimodal tasks requiring fine visual detail, such as computer-use agents analyzing dense screenshots or extracting data from complex diagrams.

Further, the company reported that Opus 4.7 is a more effective financial analyst, producing “rigorous analyses and models” and more professional presentations.

Opus 4.7 is relatively on par with its predecessor in safety, Anthropic said, showing low rates of concerning behavior such as “deception, sycophancy, and cooperation with misuse.” However, the company pointed out, while it improves in areas like honesty and resistance to malicious prompt injection, it is “modestly weaker” than Opus 4.6 elsewhere, such as in responding to harmful prompts, and is “not fully ideal in its behavior.”

Opus 4.7 comes amidst intense anticipation of the release of Claude Mythos 2, a general-purpose frontier model that Anthropic calls the “best-aligned” of all the models it has trained. Interestingly, in its release blog today, the company revealed that Mythos Preview scored better than Opus 4.7 on a few major benchmarks, in some cases by more than ten percentage points.

The Mythos Preview boasted higher scores on SWE-Bench Pro and SWE-Bench Verified (agentic coding); Humanity’s Last Exam (multidisciplinary reasoning); and agentic search (BrowseComp), while the two had relatively the same scores for agentic computer use, graduate-level reasoning, and visual reasoning.

Opus 4.7 is available in all Claude products and in its API, as well as in Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Pricing remains the same as Opus 4.6: $5 per million input tokens, and $25 per million output tokens.

What sets Opus 4.7 apart

Claude Opus is being branded in the industry as a “practical frontier” model, and represents Anthropic’s “most capable intelligent and multifaceted automation model,” said Yaz Palanichamy, senior advisory analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. Its core use cases include complex coding, deep research, and comprehensive agentic workflows.

The model’s core product differentiators have to do with how well-coordinated and composable its embedded algorithms are at scaling up various operational use case scenarios, he explained.

Claude Opus 4.7 is a “technically inclined” platform requiring a fair amount of deep personalization to fine-tune prompts and generate work outputs, he noted. It retains a strong lead over rival Google Gemini in terms of applied engineering use cases, even though Gemini 3.1 Pro has a larger context window (2M tokens versus Claude’s 1M tokens), although, he said, “certain [comparable] models do tend to converge on raw reasoning.”

The 4.7 update moves Opus beyond basic chatbot workflows, and positions it as more of “a copilot for complex, technical roles,” Levy noted. “It’s more capable than ever, and an even better copilot for knowledge workers.” At the same time, it poses less risk, making it a “carefully calculated compromise.”

He also pointed out that the Opus 4.7 release comes just two months after Opus 4.6 was introduced. That itself is “a signal of just how overheated the AI development cycle has become, and how brutally competitive the market now is.”

A guinea pig for Mythos?

Last week, Anthropic also announced Project Glasswing, which applies Mythos Preview to defensive security. The company is working with enterprises like AWS and Google, as well as with 30-plus cybersecurity organizations, on the initiative, and claims that Glasswing has already discovered “thousands” of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.

Anthropic is intentionally keeping Claude Mythos Preview’s release limited, first testing new cyber safeguards on “less capable models.” This includes Opus 4.7, whose cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those in Mythos. In fact, during training, Anthropic experimented to “differentially reduce” these capabilities, the company acknowledged.

Opus 4.7 has safeguards that automatically detect and block requests that suggest “prohibited or high-risk” cybersecurity uses, Anthropic explained. Lessons learned will be applied to Mythos models.

This is “an admission of sorts that the new model is somewhat intentionally dumber than its higher-end stablemate,” Levy observed, “all in an attempt to reinforce its cyber risk detection and blocking bona fides.”

From a marketing perspective, this allows Anthropic to position Opus 4.7 as an ideal balance between capability and risk, he noted, but without all the “cybersecurity baggage” of the limited availability higher-end model.

Mythos may very well be the “ultimate sacrificial lamb” at the root of broader Opus 4.7 mass adoption, Levy said. Even in the “increasing likelihood” that Mythos is never publicly released, it will serve as “an ideal means of glorifying Opus as the one model that strikes the ideal compromise for most enterprise decision-makers.”

Palanichamy agreed, noting that Opus 4.7 could serve as a public-facing guinea pig to live-test and fine-tune the automated cybersecurity safeguards that will ultimately “become a mandatory precursory requirement for an eventual broader release of Mythos-class frontier models.”