Anthropic’s New Model Excels at Reasoning and Planning—and Has the Pokémon Skills to Prove It

Anthropic announced two new models, Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4, during its first developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday. Claude 4 Opus will be immediately available to paying Claude subscribers, while Claude Sonnet 4 will be available to free and paid users. The new models, which jump the naming convention from 3.7 straight to 4, have a number of strengths, including their ability to reason, plan, and remember the context of conversations over extended periods of time, the company says. Claude 4 Opus is also even better at playing Pokémon than its predecessor. “It was able to work agentically on Pokémon for 24 hours,” says Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger in an interview with WIRED. Previously, the longest the model could play was just 45 minutes, a company spokesperson added. A few months ago, Anthropic launched a Twitch stream called “Claude Plays Pokémon” which showcases Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s abilities at Pokémon Red live. The demo is meant to show h ... Read full article.