I've done a couple side by sides on web chat with the same prompt on Opus 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 and the output gets longer/more verbose on version increment. The enerr variants are definitely much wordier.
On the other hand, the newer variants also tend to benchmark higher so it's not quite a clean argument of "hey the new version eats more tokens"
From my experience new models are slower and use more tokens even on questions which gpt 4 answered correctly. It is mostly because newer models tend to be more verbose (even with prompt requesting short answers).
I've done a couple side by sides on web chat with the same prompt on local 4b, 14b, 32b open models and the output gets longer/more verbose on version increment.
Its rather frustrating, slower tokens and more tokens.
On the other hand, the newer variants also tend to benchmark higher so it's not quite a clean argument of "hey the new version eats more tokens"