Opus 4.7 Benchmarks: A Half-Step Up, and the Mythos Distillation Theory

Key Takeaways

• Opus 4.7 is better than 4.6 in essentially every benchmark — but the step up is consistently about half the distance between 4.6 and Mythos preview. On SWE-bench Pro (the main software engineering benchmark): 53.4% (4.6) → 64.3% (4.7) → ~75% (Mythos). A +10.9% improvement that lands almost exactly halfway.
• The same halfway pattern appears across multiple benchmarks. Nick finds this suspicious — genuine independent model improvements rarely produce such mathematically clean gaps. It suggests intentional calibration, not emergent performance.
• Nick's Mythos distillation theory: Opus 4.7 is probably Mythos preview "basically just distilled, dummified down a little bit and running on a lot faster and better hardware." A smaller, faster version of the same model rather than a new architecture.
• Agentic terminal coding shows a smaller step up: 65.4% → 69.4% (4.7) → 82% (Mythos). Nick thinks this is where the safety concerns from Mythos concentrate — Anthropic is reluctant to give the full agentic terminal capability to general users because this is the attack surface that allowed Mythos to compromise Chrome and multiple operating systems.
• Anthropic's position on Mythos: they've described it as being like "giving kids nuclear weapons" — a model capable enough to autonomously compromise security systems. This is why they're not releasing Mythos directly, and why they're releasing a distilled version that's meaningfully safer on the agentic dimensions.
• GPT/Spud model expected within days of Opus 4.7 — the competitive cycle is tight enough that significant Anthropic launches are reliably followed by OpenAI responses within a week.

Benchmark Comparison

Mythos preview figures are approximate, sourced from Nick's benchmark comparison scorecard in the video.

Related on OpenClawDatabase

• Was Opus 4.6 Intentionally Degraded? — Nate Herk's analysis of the quality regression that preceded 4.7
• Claude Opus 4.7 as a 24/7 Trading Agent — practical application of the upgraded model
• OpenClaw Configuration — how to pin and upgrade model versions