Claude 4: Anthropic's AI Model Redefines Coding Tasks

Anthropic first released Claude Code in February 2025, and its recent in-vogue status has been a long time coming, according to more than a dozen tech industry leaders and engineers The Verge spoke with. Anthropic told The Verge that in the past year, it has increased eightfold its number of business customers that each represent more than $1 million in revenue run rate. The company also won more categories than any of its competitors in Scale AI's "Model of the Year" awards, including "best agentic model" for its performance on popular leaderboards and benchmarks.

Still, the pace of developers switching to Claude Code over the holidays "is not something I think any of us anticipated," Maggie Basta, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, said. "The move from different agentic coding interfaces to Claude Code has been pretty astonishing." Industry figures attribute part of the success to an Anthropic holiday promotion, which doubled rate limits for certain subscribers and drew in new or casual users while they had extra time over the break. "For people who don't do this stuff every day … going from that to, 'Oh shit, this is really impressive' -- that, I think, helped a lot," Austin Parker, director of open source at Honeycomb, said.

Much of Claude Code's success, though, is due to Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model, released days before Thanksgiving. Opus 4.5 moved the needle on Claude's popularity for virtually every tech industry source The Verge spoke with.