Claude 4 – The first universal assistant?

Takeaways from early testing of Anthropic’s latest model

Hi Nathan Warren here.

The promise of a truly universal AI assistant – one that bridges thinking and doing, research and execution – is becoming a practical reality. I got early access to Anthropic’s new model, Claude 4 Opus, and had a chance to run it through its paces while preparing for annual leave. So my key question was: can Opus 4 help me get more done in one day than I could do alone or even with other LLMs?

The TL;DR is: the “open agentic web” Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott describes—a world where AI agents can act on your behalf through open, reliable, interoperable protocols—is starting to materialize. Today, I’ll walk you through five tasks I put to Opus 4—and how it handled them.