Traders bet Anthropic will ship new Claude Opus model within days

Prediction market traders see a 91% chance that Anthropic releases its next Claude Opus model by the end of July, with odds surging 36 points in recent days. The Polymarket contract, which has attracted more than $227,000 in trading volume, puts a 68% probability on a launch by this Thursday, 24 July. A release by Tuesday is priced at just 17%, suggesting traders expect an announcement later in the week rather than imminently. The odds of a new Opus arriving by the end of August stand at 95%, rising to 99% by the end of October. The market resolves only on models explicitly branded Opus, meaning Anthropic's Mythos-class Fable 5, released in June, does not qualify. Anthropic has maintained a rapid release cadence this year , shipping Opus 4.6 in February, Opus 4.7 in April and Opus 4.8 in late May, a new flagship roughly every six to eight weeks. That rhythm has fed speculation that a successor, potentially a full Claude Opus 5, is close, with leaks referencing an internal codename, Honeycomb. Rumoured capabilities include major gains in agentic coding, context windows above 1 million tokens and improved efficiency, though none has been confirmed by the company. The odds jumped sharply on 1 July, when the December contract moved from around 50 cents to 93 cents in a single session, suggesting traders had seen a corroborating signal rather than a public announcement. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei conceded in April that Opus trailed the unreleased Mythos model on benchmarks, framing Opus 4.8 as a bridge rather than a ceiling. A separate Polymarket contract asking whether the model lands specifically on Thursday, 23 July trades at 29%. Traders also assign a 95% chance that a new Claude Sonnet model will arrive ...