Anthropic’s new Claude 4.1 dominates coding tests days before GPT-5 arrives

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 ...