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Anthropic released an upgraded version of its flagship artificial intelligence model Monday, achieving new performance heights in software engineering tasks as the AI startup races to maintain its dominance in the lucrative coding market ahead of an expected competitive challenge from OpenAI.
The new Claude Opus 4.1 model scored 74.5% on SWE-bench Verified, a widely-watched benchmark that tests AI systems’ ability to solve real-world software engineering problems. The performance surpasses OpenAI’s o3 model at 69.1% and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro at 67.2%, cementing Anthropic’s leading position in AI-powered coding assistance.
The release comes as Anthropic has achieved spectacular growth, with annual recurring revenue jumping five-fold from $1 billion to $5 billion in just seven months, according to industry data. However, the company’s meteoric rise has created a dangerous dependency: nearly half of its $3.1 billion in API revenue stems from just two customers — coding assistant Cursor and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot — generating $1.4 billion combined.
“This is a very scary position to be in. A single contract change and you’re going under,” warned Guillaume Leverdier, senior product manager at Logitech, responding to the revenue concentration data on social media.
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OpenAI and Anthropic both are showing pretty spectacular growth in 2025, with OpenAI doubling ARR in the last 6 months from $6bn to $12bn and Anthropic increasing 5x from $1bn to $5bn in 7 months.If we compare the sources of revenue, the picture is quite interesting:– OpenAI… pic.twitter.com/8OaN1RSm9E— Peter Gostev (@petergostev) August 4, 2025
The upgrade represents Anthropic’s latest move to fortify its position before OpenAI launches GPT-5, expected to challenge Claude’s coding supremacy. Some industry watchers questioned whether the timing suggests urgency rather than readiness.
“Opus 4.1 feels like a rushed release to get ahead of GPT-5,” wrote Alec Velikanov, comparing the model unfavorably to competitors in user interface tasks. The comment reflects broader industry speculation that Anthropic is accelerating its release schedule to main …