Anthropic Advisor Pattern: Sonnet Calling Opus Yields Frontier-Quality Output at 5x Lower Cost — Announced at Code with Claude Keynote
Simon Willison·medium signal
Anthropic revealed an 'advisor' architecture where Sonnet 4.6 handles the main workflow and calls Opus 4.7 only when frontier-level judgment is needed. Internal benchmarks show this produces frontier model quality at roughly 5x lower cost than running Opus end-to-end. This is a production-ready cost optimization pattern for anyone running autonomous agents — route 80% of tokens through Sonnet, escalate to Opus for critical decisions.