Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, outperforms Fable 5 at half the cost

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, during an interview on "The Circuit with Emily Chang" at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California, on April 30, 2026. Jason Henry | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Anthropic on Friday announced its latest artificial intelligence model, Claude Opus 5, which the company described as its best-performing and most cost-effective offering across a range of industry benchmarks.

Key Highlights

• Performance: Opus 5 outperforms Anthropic's previous model, Claude Fable 5, on coding and knowledge work evaluations.
• Pricing: Opus 5 is half the price of Fable 5 — $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
• Design: The company said the model is "designed to be used every day," according to a blog post.
• Limitations: Anthropic noted that Opus 5 is not state-of-the-art for "risky, dual-use capabilities," such as cybersecurity.

Market Context

The model launch comes as Anthropic and its chief rival, OpenAI, work to appeal to a more cost-conscious customer base. Enterprises are increasingly reluctant to experiment with expensive models without a clear picture of return on investment.

Anthropic also faces pressure from competitors offering cheaper alternatives, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and several Chinese startups.

"Enterprises, in our feedback and with our customer base, are looking for value," said Dianne Penn, Anthropic's head of product management for research, in an interview with CNBC. "If it's a cheaper model or a cheaper offering, but it's not accomplishing a similar level of quality, it's actually not useful."

Recent Model History

Anthropic has faced intense scrutiny since releasing Claude Mythos Preview in April, a model rolled out to a select group of users. The company said it was extremely capable in cybersecurity, excelling at discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

In June, Anthropic released:

• Mythos 5 — an updated version of the earlier model
• Fable 5 — a version deemed safe for general use, with capabilities exceeding all previous publicly released models

Days after their release, Anthropic had to briefly disable access to both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 to comply with a government export control directive citing "national security authorities." The export controls were lifted after roughly two weeks of intense negotiations, and access to both models was restored.

Government Collaboration

Penn said Anthropic continues to collaborate with government agencies as part of its pre-deployment and testing processes, including with Opus 5. The company noted that Opus 5 remains behind Mythos 5 in offensive cybersecurity and biology research.

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By Ashley Capoot | Published 1 hour ago