Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, a more cost-effective AI model for coding and enterprise
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5, a new AI model designed to offer nearly all the intelligence of its top-tier Claude Fable 5 at half the price. The model targets coding, agentic tasks, and enterprise workflows.
AI company Anthropic launched its Claude Opus 5 model on Friday, stating it delivers nearly the same intelligence as its flagship Claude Fable 5 but at half the cost. This move signals a shift in the AI race towards the economics of daily use, rather than just raw capability.
The Opus 5 model is immediately available across all of Anthropic's platforms. It is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, matching its predecessor, Opus 4.8. It will serve as the default model for Claude Max, the company's premium consumer tier, and the most capable option on Claude Pro.
Anthropic is positioning Opus 5 not as their smartest model, but as a more economically viable option for many enterprise tasks. The company suggests that most important AI work for businesses falls into a category where near-state-of-the-art intelligence, delivered efficiently, outperforms cutting-edge intelligence at a much higher cost. Benchmarks show Opus 5 outperforming previous versions and some rivals on coding and knowledge work evaluations, including significant gains on the Frontier-Bench coding benchmark.
While acknowledging Opus 5 still trails behind competitors in specialized areas like cybersecurity and biology research, Anthropic highlights its strengths in bounded tasks. A company spokesperson differentiated it from Fable 5 by explaining that Opus 5 excels at tasks with specific, measurable outcomes, whereas Fable 5 is suited for longer, autonomous projects requiring sustained coherence over hours or days.
The model's cost-efficiency is further emphasized by an adjustable "effort" setting, allowing users to trade intelligence for speed and token savings. Early adopters have reported notable improvements, such as reduced token consumption and faster processing times for complex tasks. As enterprise AI adoption grows, the cost of inference has become a critical factor, and Anthropic's strategy focuses on delivering high performance at a more accessible price point.