Claude Opus 5 arrives with near Fable performance at half the price

Anthropic announced Thursday the release of Claude Opus 5, a model the company says delivers near Fable 5 performance at half the price. The company said Opus 5 comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains and has the strongest knowledge work performance of any model it has released. Anthropic said pricing remains the same as Opus 4.8 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The model is available now to all user tiers that previously had access to Opus 4.8. The company said it expects Opus 5 to be the daily driver, especially in the enterprise. Cursor co-founder Sualeh Asif said Opus 5 delivers near Fable 5 intelligence at Opus speed and cost. Harvey head of applied research Niko Grupen said the model is a clear step up in performance on legal agent work and maintains quality at lower reasoning levels, generating 26% fewer tokens on average compared to Opus 4.8 at max reasoning. Stripe software engineer Cristian Rivera called Opus 5 a clear generational step up from Opus 4.8. Anthropic also announced a fast mode research preview for Opus 5 with 150% faster token generation at double the standard price. The company introduced automatic fallbacks when a safety classifier declines a request and mid-conversation tool changes that allow developers to swap external tools without losing the prompt cache.