AI tool comparison
Claude Opus 4.7 vs Ternary Bonsai
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Foundation Models
Claude Opus 4.7
Anthropic's new flagship — 87.6% SWE-bench, 1M context
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Paid
Entry
Claude Opus 4.7 is Anthropic's latest flagship model, released April 16. It scores 87.6% on SWE-bench Verified — a 13-point improvement over Claude Opus 4.6 — and 94.2% on GPQA, making it competitive with the top frontier models on coding and scientific reasoning benchmarks. The context window extends to 1 million tokens with substantially improved retrieval accuracy at the far end of the window. The release introduces "Routines" — a first-party feature for defining persistent agentic workflows that Claude can execute autonomously across multiple sessions. Routines are defined in structured YAML and can include tool calls, conditional logic, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Anthropic positions this as a more reliable alternative to custom agent frameworks for common use cases. Pricing remains unchanged from Opus 4.6: $5/M input tokens, $25/M output tokens. The vision input resolution has been increased by 3.3x, which meaningfully improves performance on documents, diagrams, and UI screenshots. Available via API immediately and rolling out to Claude.ai Pro and Team plans over the next week.
Open Source Models
Ternary Bonsai
1.58-bit LLMs that run at 82 tok/s on M4 Pro and on your iPhone
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
PrismML's Ternary Bonsai is a family of aggressively quantized language models that take the BitNet concept to its logical extreme. Each weight is constrained to one of three values — {-1, 0, +1} — with a shared FP16 scale factor per 128-weight group. No higher-precision escape hatches, no hybrid layers. The result is a 9x reduction in memory footprint versus standard 16-bit models. The numbers are striking: the 8B model fits in 1.75 GB and hits 82 tokens per second on an M4 Pro. More impressively, it runs at 27 tokens per second on an iPhone 17 Pro Max — fast enough for real-time conversation on-device. The 8B variant scores 75.5 average across standard benchmarks, outperforming many models that are 9-10x larger. The 4B and 1.7B variants push further into mobile-optimized territory. All three models are released under the Apache 2.0 license, available on Hugging Face and GitHub, and integrated into the Locally AI iOS app for immediate on-device deployment. For developers building privacy-sensitive applications or anyone tired of paying cloud inference costs, Ternary Bonsai offers a compelling on-device alternative that doesn't require a beefy GPU.
Reviewer scorecard
“87.6% on SWE-bench isn't a small improvement — that's a meaningful jump for real-world coding tasks. The Routines feature addresses the biggest pain point with Claude in production: reliable multi-step agent behavior without building a custom framework.”
“82 tokens per second on M4 Pro in 1.75 GB is a genuinely impressive engineering achievement. For local tooling, code assistants, or any latency-sensitive workload where I don't want cloud round-trips, this hits a sweet spot that larger quantized models miss. Apache 2.0 means I can embed it in commercial apps without legal headaches.”
“Benchmarks look great but the 1M context window performance hasn't been independently validated at the limits. Routines sound powerful but the YAML spec is still in beta with known edge cases. If you're running stable Opus 4.6 workflows, wait a week for the community to stress-test this before migrating.”
“A 75.5 benchmark average sounds good until you compare it against 8B models quantized with GGUF Q8 — which score similarly and have years of tooling, community support, and production deployments behind them. The 9x memory savings matter on constrained devices but less so on any machine with 16GB+ RAM. Niche but real use case.”
“Anthropic is quietly winning the enterprise coding agent race. The combination of top SWE-bench scores with the Routines feature is a moat — developers don't switch orchestration frameworks easily once workflows are deployed. This release deepens that lock-in strategically.”
“On-device AI at 27 tokens per second on a phone is the inflection point that makes LLMs a platform primitive rather than a cloud service. Once inference is this cheap and fast on commodity hardware, the entire economic model of AI-as-API-call collapses. Ternary quantization is an early signal of where efficiency research is heading.”
“The 3.3x vision resolution upgrade is underrated for design work. Document analysis, layout review, and iterating on visual mockups are all dramatically better. I can finally paste a full Figma export and get coherent feedback on the entire design rather than just the top half.”
“The prospect of running a capable LLM entirely on my iPhone without sending any data to a server is genuinely exciting for creative work with sensitive material. Drafting, editing, and ideation without a cloud subscription or privacy concerns — I'd pay for that, and here it's free.”
Weekly AI Tool Verdicts
Get the next comparison in your inbox
New AI tools ship daily. We compare them before you waste an afternoon.