Anthropic's new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time

Claude Opus 4 has been built to execute complex tasks that involve completing thousands of steps over several hours. For example, it created a guide for the video game Pokémon Red while playing it for more than 24 hours straight. The company's previously most powerful model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, was capable of playing for just 45 minutes, says Dianne Penn, product lead for research at Anthropic. Similarly, the company says that one of its customers, the Japanese technology company Rakuten, recently deployed Claude Opus 4 to code autonomously for close to seven hours on a complicated open-source project. Anthropic achieved these advances by improving the model's ability to create and maintain "memory files" to store key information. This enhanced ability to "remember" makes the model better at completing longer tasks.