Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5 at Half the Cost of Fable 5, Promising Near-Flagship Intelligence
Summary
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 at half the cost of Fable 5, delivering near-flagship intelligence with state-of-the-art coding, analytical, and agentic capabilities, while positioning it as the company's safest and least deceptive model yet.
Key Points
- Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, a fifth-generation model priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — half the cost of Fable 5 — delivering near-Fable-level intelligence with state-of-the-art performance in coding, analytical work, and agentic tasks.
- Opus 5 is being positioned as Anthropic's safest model to date, with the lowest rates of deception and least susceptibility to misuse, while early testers including Cursor, Zapier, and Box report strong results in debugging and knowledge work.
- The release deepens confusion around Anthropic's model lineup, as Opus — once the flagship tier — now sits awkwardly between Sonnet and Haiku in perceived power, while Fable 5 remains restricted to premium users amid ongoing compute shortages.