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On 24 July 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, and with it the Claude 5 family is complete: Fable 5 at the top, Sonnet 5 for the speed-and-intelligence balance, and now Opus 5 in the middle — the model Anthropic positions as its default choice for complex agentic coding and enterprise work. The headline: near–Fable 5 capability at half the price, and the very same price developers already paid for Opus 4.8.
Claude Opus 5 in brief
Opus 5 is the direct upgrade to Opus 4.8, built to be a strong everyday assistant: it works through a hard problem end to end without much back-and-forth, and handles both coding and general office work. The official numbers from Anthropic:
- Model ID: claude-opus-5
- Pricing: 5 dollars per million input tokens, 25 per million output — identical to Opus 4.8, and half of Fable 5.
- Context window: 1M tokens (≈ 555k words).
- Max output: 128k tokens.
- Reliable knowledge cutoff: May 2026 — newer than Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 (January 2026).
- Available today on Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry.
Why the Claude 5 family is now complete
Anthropic began its fifth generation on 9 June 2026 with Fable 5 (its most capable model, for long-running agents), followed by Sonnet 5 (the best speed-and-intelligence balance). The heart of the lineup — the Opus tier — stayed on the fourth generation until today. With Opus 5, all three primary tiers are now on the 5 generation:
| Model | Position | Input / Output per 1M tokens | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | Highest intelligence, long-running agents | $10 / $50 | 1M tokens |
| Opus 5 | Agentic coding & enterprise work | $5 / $25 | 1M tokens |
| Sonnet 5 | Best speed-and-intelligence balance | $3 / $15 | 1M tokens |
| Haiku 4.5 | Fastest and cheapest | $1 / $5 | 200k tokens |
(Haiku is still on 4.5, but the three top tiers — Fable, Opus, and Sonnet — are all on the 5 generation now.)
What changed from Opus 4.8
This is not a cosmetic bump. Anthropic's published comparisons of Opus 5 vs its predecessor:
- Coding: on Frontier-Bench v0.1, Opus 5 more than doubles Opus 4.8's performance — at a lower cost per task.
- Science: 10.2 percentage points higher on organic chemistry, and 7.7 points higher on protein-prediction tasks.
- Fresher knowledge: May 2026 cutoff vs January 2026 for 4.8.
- Same price: all of this without raising the cost above Opus 4.8.
What changed from Fable 5 (the flagship)
Fable 5 remains the reference for the hardest possible tasks, but Opus 5 gets strikingly close at half the cost — and beats it in several practical areas:
- Nearly matches its coding: on CursorBench 3.2, within 0.5% of Fable 5 — at half the cost per task.
- Wins on computer use: on OSWorld 2.0, it surpasses Fable 5's result at roughly one-third the cost.
- Better at business workflows and agentic research.
- Far fewer restrictions: it refuses and interrupts about 85% less often than Fable 5, making it better for broad, everyday deployment.
- Where Fable 5 still leads: the most advanced tasks such as cybersecurity exploit development and advanced biology (a deliberate safety gap).
Notably, Anthropic says that even at minimal effort, Opus 5 succeeds at more business-workflow tasks than other models running at high effort.
Opus 5 vs competitors, by the numbers: GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and Grok 4
The real competition today is between OpenAI's GPT family (latest is GPT-5.5, launched April 2026), Google's Gemini (version 3.1), xAI's Grok 4, and DeepSeek. Anthropic's official Opus 5 figures were framed against the "next-best model" without naming it, so we complete the picture with independent numbers. Important caveat: because Opus 5 launched today, direct independent head-to-heads for it aren't in yet. The table below benchmarks Opus 4.8 (Opus 5's direct predecessor) against the field — and Opus 5 builds on and exceeds that baseline.
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | GPT-5.5 | Gemini 3.1 Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified (real-world coding) | 88.6% | ≈ 80% | ≈ 82% |
| SWE-bench Pro (harder coding) | 69.2% | ≈ 64% | Lower |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (terminal agent) | 74.6% | 78.2% | — |
| OSWorld (computer use) | 83.4% | 78.7% | — |
| GDPval-AA (knowledge work) | 1890 | 1769 | 1314 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 256k | 1M tokens |
| Input price / 1M tokens | $5 | Varies | $2 (under 200K) |
The read: the Opus line leads on real-world coding, computer use, and knowledge work, while GPT-5.5 edges ahead on some terminal tasks. On hard math, Anthropic's flagship Fable 5 tops FrontierMath at 87.0% vs 85.3% for GPT-5.5.
And Opus 5 itself? Anthropic says it beats the "next-best model" by roughly 3× on the abstract-reasoning benchmark ARC-AGI 3, and by about 1.5× on Zapier AutomationBench (agentic automation) for the same cost per task. On an automated behavioral audit it scored 2.3 on misaligned behavior — the lowest (best) among the compared models. In other words, Opus 5 raises the already-leading Opus 4.8 baseline above, not the reverse.
Key new features
- The "effort" switch: choose maximum intelligence, or conserve tokens for faster, cheaper results — per task.
- Fast mode: up to 2.5× the default speed (at double the price) for latency-sensitive work.
- Mid-conversation tool changes (beta) for more flexible agent workflows.
- Automatic model fallbacks (beta): switch to another model automatically when needed.
- 1M-token context for large codebases and documents in one pass.
What this means for businesses
The core of the news for any company: capabilities once reserved for the priciest model are now available at half the cost. That lowers the price of building AI assistants, automating operations, and internal coding tools — without sacrificing quality. And because Opus 5 refuses and interrupts less, with fresher knowledge, it's a more practical choice for broad deployment to users and staff.
The takeaway
With Opus 5 completing the Claude 5 family, "front-of-pack performance at a sensible price" is now available to everyone: results that rival GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 and approach Fable 5, at half the top-tier cost, with fresher knowledge. For business owners, it's a good moment to re-evaluate what can be automated and built with AI.
Sources
- Anthropic — Claude Opus 5 announcement: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5
- Anthropic — Models overview (official specs & pricing): https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/overview
- Independent comparison figures (Opus 4.8 vs GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro): hundredtabs.com, bitsminds.com, lmcouncil.ai
Frequently asked questions
What is Claude Opus 5?
An Anthropic AI model released on 24 July 2026, the direct upgrade to Opus 4.8, built for complex agentic coding and enterprise work, priced at $5 input and $25 output per million tokens.
How much does Opus 5 cost, and why is it called half the price?
It costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 output — the same as Opus 4.8, and half the price of the flagship Fable 5 ($10 and $50) — while performing close to Fable 5.
Is Opus 5 better than GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1?
The Opus line leads on real-world coding (Opus 4.8 scores about 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified vs ~80% for GPT-5.5 and ~82% for Gemini), computer use, and knowledge work, while GPT-5.5 edges ahead on some terminal tasks. Opus 5 builds on and exceeds that baseline, and Anthropic says it beats the next-best model by 3× on ARC-AGI 3.
What's the difference between Opus 5 and Opus 4.8?
Opus 5 roughly doubles coding performance on Frontier-Bench, advances in science (chemistry and protein), has fresher knowledge (May 2026), and costs the same as 4.8.
Is the Claude 5 family complete now?
Yes — the three primary tiers are all on the 5 generation: Fable 5, Opus 5, and Sonnet 5. (Haiku is still on 4.5.)
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