Claude platform introduces advisor strategy pairing Opus with Sonnet or Haiku, enabling near-Opus intelligence in agents at lower cost with single API calls and improved performance in evals

Anthropic has expanded its advisor strategy from the Claude API into the Claude Platform, allowing developers to build agents where a cheaper, faster executor model (Claude Sonnet or Claude Haiku) can selectively consult Claude Opus as a higher‑intelligence advisor within a single API call. In this pattern, Sonnet or Haiku runs the agent end‑to‑end—handling tools, browsing, and response generation—and only invokes Opus mid‑task when facing harder planning or reasoning steps, with the entire interaction sharing one context and not requiring a separate orchestration layer. Anthropic’s documentation and early benchmarks indicate that this pairing can deliver near‑Opus‑level quality at lower cost, particularly for complex coding and research agents. For example, Sonnet 4.6 with an Opus 4.6 advisor achieved higher scores on benchmarks such as SWE‑bench Multilingual compared with Sonnet alone, while costing less than running Opus for the full task, and Haiku 4.5 with Opus showed large improvements on tasks like BrowseComp versus Haiku alone. On the implementation side, the advisor capability is exposed through an advisor tool (e.g., advisor20260301) that developers add to their tools list, with controls like maxuses and max_tokens to cap advisor calls and manage spend, while continuing to use the same endpoint and SDK as existing Claude Platform agents. By bringing this advisor strategy into the Claude Platform, Anthropic is effectively formalizing a hybrid‑model agent design that aims to balance intelligence, latency, and cost for high‑volume or complex workloads. It is particularly relevant for teams building “agentic” systems—such as coding assistants, research copilots, or automation bots—that need stronger planning or reasoning only at specific decision points rather than throughout an entire interaction, enabling them to reserve premium Opus capacity for the hardest parts of a task instead of every token generated.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Claude Advisor API: Use Opus for 80% Less Money - Builder.io (builder.io)
• Advisor tool - Claude API Docs (platform.claude.com)
• We're bringing the advisor strategy to the Claude Platform. Pair ... (x.com)
• Anthropic Advisor Strategy: Smarter AI Agents (2026) (buildfastwithai.com)

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