Key Takeaways Opus 4.7 posts the strongest coding numbers of any generally-available frontier model: 87.6% on SWE-Bench Verified (up from 80.8% on Opus 4.6) and 64.3% on SWE-Bench Pro (up from 53.4%). On CursorBench it hits 70% versus Opus 4.6's 58%. The benchmark jump is real, but it's not the most interesting change. The release is about agent reliability, not just capability. Anthropic's own framing emphasizes that Opus 4.7 achieves the highest quality-per-tool-call ratio they've measured, with markedly lower rates of looping and better recovery from mid-run tool failures. For engineers running long autonomous jobs, that matters more than a benchmark delta. Two new surfaces to learn: xhigh effort level and Task Budgets (public beta). xhigh sits between high and max and is the new default in Claude Code. Task Budgets let you cap token spend across a multi-step run so the model prioritizes work instead of burning compute on the first sub-task.…