Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 with near-Fable 5 intelligence at half the price
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 with near-Fable 5 intelligence at half the price")
Claude Opus 5 is here: Anthropic promises smarter AI at half the price of Fable 5
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, an AI model aimed at coding and everyday professional work. The company says it approaches Fable 5 intelligence at half the price, while offering stronger efficiency and major gains over Opus 4.8.
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, promising users near-frontier AI intelligence without paying the company's highest price. Released on July 24, Opus 5 is designed for everyday professional work, including software development, research and complex tasks. Anthropic says the model comes close to the intelligence of its more powerful Claude Fable 5 at half the price.
The launch also shows where the AI race is heading. Companies are no longer competing only to build the smartest model. They increasingly need models that can deliver strong performance without making every task prohibitively expensive.
Claude Opus 5: What has changed?
Opus 5 costs the same as its predecessor, Opus 4.8, but Anthropic says it delivers significantly better performance. On coding and knowledge-work evaluations including Frontier-Bench and GDPval-AA, Anthropic says Opus 5 has reached state-of-the-art performance. It is also designed to use computing resources more efficiently, reducing the cost of completing many tasks. The model can adjust how much effort it spends on a problem. Users can therefore favour deeper reasoning for difficult work or use fewer tokens when speed and cost matter more. Opus 5 also has a Fast mode, which Anthropic says operates around 2.5 times faster than its standard mode.
Opus 5 or Fable 5: Which should you use?
Anthropic is not positioning Opus 5 as a replacement for Fable 5. Dianne Penn, an Anthropic product leader, told Reuters that users should choose Opus 5 for value, while Fable 5 remains better suited to highly autonomous projects that could continue for days.
That distinction could matter to businesses. Everyday coding and office tasks may not need the company's most expensive frontier model. Anthropic says Opus 5 is now the default model for Claude Max users and the strongest model available to Claude Pro subscribers. It is also available through the Claude API.
Anthropic says Opus 5 is safer, too
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There is another notable difference. Opus 5 remains behind Anthropic's Mythos 5 on cybersecurity tasks. Reuters reports that it was less capable of exploiting cyber vulnerabilities than Fable 5, allowing Anthropic to deploy it with less restrictive cyber safeguards. Anthropic also says its automated behavioural testing found Opus 5 to be its most aligned model so far, with lower rates of problematic behaviour. The bigger story, however, is economics. If AI models approaching frontier-level performance can become significantly cheaper, businesses may not always need the most powerful model available. For Anthropic, Opus 5 is its bet that the next stage of the AI race will be fought not just over intelligence, but over how much useful intelligence customers can get for their money.
