Overview
- Opus 5, which Anthropic released Friday, is available across the company’s apps and API and is now the default model for Claude Max and the strongest option on Claude Pro.
- Anthropic priced Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, matching Opus 4.8 and about half the billed rate of Fable 5 to reduce enterprise compute costs.
- The release includes user controls and developer tools such as a three‑level effort toggle to trade cost for depth, a Fast mode that speeds token output, mid‑conversation tool swapping, and automatic fallbacks when safety classifiers flag requests.
- Anthropic says Opus 5 posts large gains on coding, knowledge‑work and scientific benchmarks and can self‑verify and recover from errors more often, but the company kept Mythos/Fable‑class systems restricted for high‑risk cyber and biology work.
- For users this means cheaper, more predictable bills and fewer hard refusals, while regulators and rivals watch whether lower‑cost frontier performance shifts demand away from gated models or open‑weight alternatives.