Opus 4.8 adds effort controls and cheaper fast-mode access

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 on 28 May, keeping the model’s price at the level of Opus 4.7. The launch also added effort controls in claude.ai and dynamic workflows in Claude Code, giving users more ways to shape how much work a request receives. Fast mode became three times cheaper than on earlier models, according to the company.

Anthropic positioned the release as an improvement in coding, agent tasks and knowledge work, supported by its own evaluations and partner feedback. The separate controls matter operationally: a model upgrade, a faster serving mode and a workflow feature affect different parts of a task. A team adopting all three should still measure completion quality, time and total usage rather than interpreting one benchmark as the whole experience.