On a busy Thursday of AI news (May 28), Anthropic announced the release of its latest reasoning model, Claude Opus 4.8. Anthropic has been on a tear recently with rapidfire release Opus models: Opus 4.7 was released just a month and a half earlier, and Opus 4.6 only two months before that.

What's even more interesting is that Microsoft wasted no time in announcing the rollout of Opus 4.8 - the very same day - in Copilot Studio, M365 Copilot as well as Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot.

How to access Opus 4.8 in Copilot Studio and M365 Copilot

To gain access to Claude Opus 4.8 in Copilot Studio and M365 Copilot, the tenant must be enrolled in Copilot Frontier, and enabled for Anthropic models in AI providers operating as ‎Microsoft‎ subprocessors from Copilot settings in Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

When using Copilot Cowork, you can select Opus 4.8 from the model dropdown near the top right of your screen.

With Copilot Chat however, while you can choose between GPT and Opus, you do not have the ability to pick a specific Opus model at this time.

As for Copilot Studio, this latest model is only available in Early Release cycle environments. In addition to enabling Anthropic models from the M365 Admin Center, administrators must also enable Anthropic models for each desired Early Release cycle environment from the Power Platform Admin Center by going to Manage > Environments, selecting the desired environment, then going to Settings > Product > Features.