Claude Opus 5 launches at half the price of Anthropic’s top model
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 today, positioning it as a mid-tier workhorse that the company claims performs close to its more capable Fable 5 model at roughly half the cost.
What Opus 5 Does
The model targets two audiences: developers running complex coding tasks and knowledge workers handling general office assignments. Anthropic says it can work through multi-step problems with minimal back-and-forth, check its own output, and recover from errors rather than stalling. The company also reports improvements over its predecessor, Opus 4.8, on complex coding benchmarks, and calls it its strongest generally available model for scientific research, citing gains on biology tasks specifically.
Beyond code and research, Anthropic is pitching Opus 5 for design, marketing, accounting, and large document analysis. That range is part of a broader push to move Claude into professional workflows outside the typical chat and code use cases.
Pricing and the Fable 5 Relationship
Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The practical API play is straightforward: use Opus 5 for routine coding and general office tasks, then step up to the more expensive Fable 5 for the hardest assignments.
Fable 5 remains Anthropic’s most capable broadly available model. It’s notably better at writing software, running long projects with limited supervision, and handling difficult tasks. For context on how capable Fable 5 is: the U.S. government grew concerned about its ability to discover and exploit software vulnerabilities. There’s also a more restricted version called Mythos 5, available only to government and select cybersecurity organizations, that goes further on both cyber defense and offense.
Adjustable Effort and Fast Mode
Opus 5 includes three effort levels: low, medium, and high. Users pick their own cost-versus-capability trade-off depending on the task. Anthropic says Opus 5 is its most cost-efficient model on the DeepSearchQA and Humanity’s Last Exam benchmarks for tool-using models.
There’s also a fast mode available in the Claude chatbot and Claude Code. It delivers 2.5x faster output token generation at roughly twice the standard price. Anthropic is releasing it as a research preview to all API users to gather usage data.
Availability
Opus 5 is the default model for Claude Max subscribers, with standard token limits applying across all paid plans.
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