Claude Opus 5 is here, Anthropic says it is as good as Fable and also cheaper

Published 25 July 2026 · tech

Anthropic has just upped the ante in the AI race with Claude Opus 5. After releasing Claude Fable 5 to the public a few weeks

Anthropic has just upped the ante in the AI race with Claude Opus 5. After releasing Claude Fable 5 to the public a few weeks ago, Anthropic says that Opus 5 brings similar capabilities but at half the price. That is, you can use Opus 5 to get similar performance in tasks like coding and knowledge work to Claude Fable 5 – an AI model the US temporarily banned for how powerful it was – but at a lower cost. Read Full Story The Claude Opus 5 release comes at a time when US AI labs are facing pressure from Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 when it comes to delivering strong performance at affordable rates. How good is Claude Opus 5? To give you some context on how good Fable 5 was considered to be, the US initially banned all foreigners from using the AI model over cybersecurity concerns. And now, Opus 5 brings similar performance, but for everyday use.

Anthropic says that Opus 5 “provides greatly improved performance for the same cost as its predecessor, Opus 4.8,” with users able to adjust effort settings to optimise for intelligence or conserve tokens for faster and cheaper results. According to benchmarks shared by Anthropic, Claude Opus 5 can not just match but outperform Fable 5 on 10 of 14 metrics and comes close to Fable 5’s frontier-level intelligence at a lower operating cost. Opus 5 also managed to outperform OpenAI’s flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol in select benchmarks. On software and knowledge benchmarks, Anthropic said Opus 5 set new standards. On Frontier-Bench v0.1, it surpassed competing models and more than doubled Opus 4.8’s performance at a lower cost per task. On CursorBench 3.2, it came within 0.5 per cent of Fable 5’s peak score at half the cost. Anthropic cited early examples from testing. This included Opus 5 writing its own computer vision pipeline to reconstruct a machine part as a 3D FreeCAD model, and helping an engineer at a trading firm build a market data feed for a new exchange in a single session.

Opus 5 is not trained for cybersecurity While Claude Opus 5 can perform at the level of Fable in certain tasks, Anthropic has clarified that it comes with major safeguards when it comes to cybersecurity. The AI startup says that Opus 5 was not state-of-the-art for such “risky, dual-use capabilities,” and remains behind Mythos 5 in offensive cyber and biology research. Following the cybersecurity concerns arising from Claude Mythos, Anthropic says that it had intentionally avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks. While Opus 5 can allow developers to” identify and fix software vulnerabilities,” it will block “high-risk uses.” Such safeguards likely allowed Anthropic to face less pushback from the US over the release of the model. Claude Opus 5 is cheaper than Fable Claude Opus is priced at $5 (roughly Rs 480) per million input tokens and $25 (roughly Rs 2,410) per million output tokens, matching Opus 4.8. For context, Claude Fable 5 is priced at $10 (roughly Rs 960) per million input tokens and $50 (roughly Rs 4650) per million output tokens.