Anthropic Launches Advisor Strategy: Opus as the Consultant Paired with Sonnet to Improve Efficiency and Reduce Costs by 12%

Anthropic announced on April 9 that it would正式地正式引入 the “Advisor Strategy” into the Claude Platform. Developers can now have Opus play an advisory role through the Messages API, pairing Sonnet or Haiku as the executor, achieving near-Opus-level intelligence in a single API request while significantly lowering costs. This capability is currently offered in the form of a public beta.

How it works: executors automatically consult Opus when they encounter difficult problems

The core idea behind the Advisor Strategy is to separate reasoning from execution. After developers add an advisor tool in their Messages API call, when a Sonnet or Haiku agent faces a difficult decision during task execution, it will automatically consult Opus, obtain planning guidance, and then continue executing. The entire process is completed within a single API request, with no extra orchestration required from the developer.

This architecture is similar to the division of labor between senior consultants and operators in a team—Opus handles high-level strategic judgment, while Sonnet or Haiku handles actual operations. The two collaborate within the same workflow.

Hands-on results: better performance at lower cost

According to the evaluation data Anthropic published, on the SWE-bench Multilingual benchmark, Sonnet combined with the Opus advisor performed 2.7 percentage points better than using Sonnet alone, while the cost per task actually dropped by 11.9%.

The reason costs decreased is that most tasks are still handled by the cheaper Sonnet or Haiku. Only at critical decision points is Opus called, avoiding the high expense of using Opus throughout the entire process.

What it means for developers

The Advisor Strategy provides developers building AI agents with a new cost-efficiency trade-off option. In the past, developers had to choose between “using Opus end-to-end but at high cost” or “using Sonnet end-to-end, but risking mistakes when encountering complex problems.” Now, it’s possible to get the advantages of both through a hybrid architecture.

The community’s reaction has been enthusiastic. Some developers likened it to the “call for help” lifeline from the “Millionaire” TV show—executors work independently most of the time, and only turn to the experts when they encounter truly difficult problems.

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