First token counts reveal Opus 4.7 costs significantly more than 4.6 despite Anthropic's flat pricing Anthropic's Opus 4.7 carries the same sticker price as 4.6, but it burns through noticeably more tokens per request. That's according to measurements published by developer Abhishek Ray on Claude Code Camp. Anthropic's own migration guide cites an increase of 1.0 to 1.35x. Ray's numbers somewhat line up in that range, while some content types push past it: 1.325x on average for real Claude Code content, 1.445x for a CLAUDE.md file, and 1.47x for technical documentation.

A community evaluation on tokens.billchambers.me goes even higher, pointing to 37.4 percent more tokens and costs per request across 483 submissions. Code takes a bigger hit, Ray notes, while prose sees a smaller bump, and Chinese and Japanese texts are barely affected.

For a sample session of 80 turns, he estimates an extra 20 to 30 percent in costs, pushing the bill from $6.65 to somewhere between $7.86 and $8.76. In return, users get slightly better instruction following: a test using the IFEval benchmark across 20 prompts shows Opus 4.7 sticking to strict instructions five percentage points more reliably than its predecessor. AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now.