Anthropic Launches Cheaper Claude Opus 5 Model

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on Friday, priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — identical to its predecessor, Opus 4.8. The model delivers near-frontier intelligence at half the cost of the company's top Claude Fable 5, and becomes the default on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro. Anthropric is not positioning Opus 5 as its smartest model, conceding that title to Fable 5 and acknowledging rivals hold edges in certain areas. Instead, the company argues that the most economically valuable AI work occurs in a middle band of difficulty, where efficient near-frontier intelligence matters more than raw capability.