Axotron Take
Anthropic quietly owns the coding crown. Opus 4.7 at 87.6% on SWE-bench is not a small lead. If you're building anything serious with code agents, this is the model right now.
Full Notes
Claude Opus 4.7 launched April 16, 2026 and immediately took the top spot on SWE-bench Verified at 87.6% — second only to Anthropic's own restricted Mythos Preview at 93.9%, which isn't publicly available.
What makes Opus 4.7 different isn't just the benchmark number. Production reports show it sustains longer agent traces before reliability starts to decay compared to GPT-5.5. For complex, multi-file codebases that need an agent to keep working without falling apart mid-task, that matters more than a single score.
It also leads on tool orchestration — the ability to coordinate multiple tools in sequence without losing context or making wrong calls. This is what makes it the strongest choice for anyone building serious AI coding agents or autonomous workflows.
Pricing sits at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Not cheap — but for the use cases it's built for, it's the best tool available right now. Anthropic is quietly winning the developer trust battle even as OpenAI wins the headline battle.
