Anthropic launches Opus 5 AI model, claims near-Fable 5 performance at half the cost

Source: Reuters

Anthropic on Friday launched Opus 5, its latest AI model, which the startup says approaches the capabilities of its more powerful counterpart, Fable 5, at half the price.

The San Francisco-based lab stated that the new Claude AI model is well suited for daily office and computer programming tasks.

Key Details

• Efficiency: The release is more efficient than May’s Opus 4.8, reflecting a rapid pace of development, according to Anthropic product leader Dianne Penn.
• Pricing & Positioning: Users should choose Opus 5 for value and Fable 5 for “days-long, very autonomous projects,” Penn said.
• Safety & Security:
• In testing, Opus 5 was less capable of exploiting cyber vulnerabilities than Anthropic’s top-shelf AI, allowing for less restrictive safeguards compared to Fable 5.
• Opus 5 was also less susceptible to being tricked into misuse than Anthropic’s other current models.

Industry Context

• Fable 5, released in June, was temporarily unavailable after U.S. concerns that its capabilities could be diverted to foreign military intelligence.
• When asked about the Kimi K3 “open” model from China-based Moonshot—which the U.S. accused of freeloading off Anthropic—Penn said it “remains to be seen” how open-weight models generally perform on complicated real-world projects that users ask Claude to tackle.

Note: Open-weight models allow users to download, run, and customise the virtual brains of an AI, unlike proprietary models.

Quote from Anthropic: “We’re building and continue to consistently deliver frontier intelligence and bring that as accessibly as possible with every model generation.” — Dianne Penn, Anthropic product leader