Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5

Anthropic announced the availability of Claude Opus 5, a “thoughtful and proactive” AI model that approaches the capabilities of Fable 5 at half the price.

“Opus 5 is designed to be used every day,” the Anthropic announcement explains. “It works more efficiently than other models. It’s the new default model on Claude Max, and the strongest model on Claude Pro.”

Anthropic claims that Opus 5 is the new state-of-the-art option for coding and knowledge work, though I’m unclear why it feels the need to acknowledge that it remains behind Mythos 5 for cybersecurity tasks. Of course it does. Compared to its predecessor, Opus 4.8, Opus 5 delivers dramatically better performance at the same cost, and meaningful improvements in scientific research.

Opus 5 is broadly available and priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, the same as Opus 4.8. It offers a Fast mode that’s 2.5 times faster than the default speed and twice the price. And Anthropic has published a prompting guide for Claude Opus 5 to help users get the most of this new model.