Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, half the input price of its own Fable 5

Anthropic launched its new flagship model, Claude Opus 5, on July 24 — and priced it in a way that puts its own product lineup in tension with itself.

The Pricing

Opus 5 is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens in standard mode, matching the pricing of the outgoing Opus 4.8. A faster mode is available at $10 input and $50 output per million tokens for users who need lower latency. Notably, Opus 5's standard-mode input price is exactly half of what Anthropic charges for Fable 5, its other current-generation model — an unusual pricing gap between two models Anthropic sells side by side.

The Model Itself

Opus 5 ships with a 1-million-token context window and introduces a new low/medium/high effort toggle, letting developers trade off cost and latency against reasoning depth for a given task — spend less compute on simple requests, more on complex ones, within the same model rather than switching between separate model tiers.

On FrontierBench v0.1, one of the newer independent reasoning benchmarks tracking frontier models, Opus 5 scored 43.3%.

Why The Timing Matters

The launch lands in the middle of the most aggressive AI pricing war the industry has seen. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family starts at $1 per million tokens. Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 undercuts both at $1.25 and $4.25. China's Kimi K3 — set to release its full weights within hours of this article — runs as low as $0.30 per million tokens on cached input, and gives its weights away entirely.

Anthropic's flagship remains priced well above all of them, betting that Opus 5's reasoning quality justifies the premium rather than competing on cost. Whether that bet holds depends partly on infrastructure Anthropic doesn't fully control on its own — the company recently committed $1.25 billion a month to renting compute capacity from a rival, a deal that will shape how much room Anthropic actually has to compete on price going forward.