Anthropic, often considered a rival to OpenAI, has unveiled the “Claude 3.7 Sonnet,” an AI model with adjustable inference time. This move aligns with the release of inference AI by competitors such as OpenAI, Google, and xAI. Alongside this new AI release, Anthropic is set to secure an additional $3.5 billion in investment, which could bring the company’s valuation to $61.5 billion.
On the 24th (local time), Anthropic launched its latest inference model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which is smaller in scale when compared with models like Opus and Haiku. Sonnet serves as a medium-sized flagship model, offering both “standard” and “expanded” reasoning capabilities. Users seeking quick answers to simple questions can use the standard feature, while those wanting results with additional reasoning can opt for the expanded reasoning feature.
Anthropic emphasizes that Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the “industry’s first hybrid inference model,” preemptively addressing the integration of general AI and inference models that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to introduce with GPT-5.
According to Anthropic, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, when using its expanded reasoning feature, matches or surpasses the performance benchmarks of OpenAI’s inference models o1 and o3 Mini. It significantly enhances coding capabilities, outperforming OpenAI in coding and agent functions even without expanded reasoning.
Anthropic also showcased a preview of “Claude Code,” a tool aimed at the developer market. Claude Code is described as an active collaborator for code searching and reading, file editing, writing and executing tests, and more. In initial tests, it successfully completed tasks typically requiring over 45 minutes of manual effort in one go.
However, the usage fees are relatively high. The expanded reasoning feature of Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available only to paying subscribers. The enterprise application interface (API) usage costs $3 for 1 million input tokens (AI computation units) and $15 for output tokens. Comparatively, OpenAI charges $1.1 and $4.4 respectively for its o3 Mini model, and there’s an even bigger gap with DeepSeek, which charges $0.55 and $2.19 respectively.
Anthropic is also pursuing additional funding with the release of the new AI. On the same day, The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic’s $3.5 billion new investment initiative is in its final stages, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX among the prospective investors. If finalized, Anthropic’s valuation will leap more than 3.3 times from $18.4 billion in early last year to $61.5 billion, in line with efforts to scale up like rivals such as OpenAI, which is seeking investments to reach a valuation exceeding $340 billion.