Anthropic today released Claude Opus 4.8 , an upgrade to its flagship model that ships at the same price as its predecessor, alongside a dramatically cheaper "fast mode" tier and a new feature that lets the model spawn hundreds of parallel subagents for codebase-scale work. The model is available immediately across Anthropic's surfaces — claude.ai, Claude Code, the API, and Cowork — at unchanged pricing: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Developers can call it as claude-opus-4-8 . The headline efficiency story is fast mode. Anthropic has slashed the price of running Opus 4.8 in fast mode — where the model produces tokens at roughly 2.5x normal speed — to $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, down from $30/$150 for Opus 4.7 That's a 3X reduction from the fast-mode pricing of previous models, and brings high-throughput inference within reach of latency-sensitive production workloads.…