Claude Opus 4.7 Introduces Task Budgets: Token-Level Budget Allocation Per Subtask Prevents Agentic Workflows from Burning Quota on Low-Value Operations

Anthropic·medium signal

Opus 4.7 (April 16) introduced task budgets — a rough token estimate for a full agentic loop including thinking, tool calls, tool results, and final output. The model sees a running countdown and prioritizes work as the budget depletes. For multi-step workflows, you can allocate a maximum token budget per subtask, preventing step 2 of a 10-step pipeline from consuming 80% of total budget on a low-value operation. Also ships xhigh effort level (between high and max), 3x vision improvement for dense screenshots, and a 12-point CursorBench gain over 4.6. Updated tokenizer may map same input to 1.0–1.35x more tokens depending on content type.