Opus 4.7 is disappointing

Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7 with ~10% better SWE-bench Pro numbers on paper, but in practice the consumer tier is regressing hard.

The marketing vs. reality gap

Anthropic claims Opus 4.7 is "substantially better at following instructions," with "notable improvements over 4.6," and almost 10% higher SWE-bench Pro. A new "extra high" reasoning tier was added. Tokenization changes mean it costs roughly 1–1.3x more than Opus 4.6 per call.

The community disagrees. Reddit's top comment calls it "a serious regression, not an upgrade." Web search citations are fabricated, tokenizers are reportedly 30% downgraded, and the car-wash sanity check (50m away, walk or drive?) trips Opus 4.7 — it tells the user to drive.

Boxmining's own test

Running the channel's instruction-following suite (tabs-not-spaces, order things, functions under 10 lines, error handling) twice on launch day, Opus 4.7 landed at the same level as Opus 4.6 — and "fails their own tests." GPT 5.4 scores 75% on the same suite.

A one-prompt space shooter came out with broken F-to-fire controls and stiff physics. GLM 5.1, priced at $72/mo (Z.AI's coding plan, up from $30), produced a visibly smoother game on the same prompt. Z.AI raised prices specifically because "our competitors are giving you slop."

Why it's degraded

The creator's read: compute is being redirected to Project Glasswing / MEOS, the enterprise-only successor already in use at Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, and Anthropic itself. The consumer Opus is left quantized and rate-limited while peak launch traffic saturates capacity. System prompt leaks suggest 4.7 is in theory stronger than 4.6 — the lever just isn't being turned for the $20–$200 subscriber tier.

Where it stands

Opus 4.7 is "usable," better than the mid-week low point, but nowhere near the February–March 4.6 baseline, let alone GPT 5.4. More benchmarks (WildBench, WildClawBench) are incoming. Until Anthropic reallocates compute, the creator is staying on GPT.