Claude Opus 5 matches Fable on coding at half the price, and Anthropic says it is the most aligned model it has ever shipped

Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 5, a model that matches or exceeds its flagship Fable 5 on most coding and knowledge-work benchmarks at half the token price. The model is the fourth Anthropic has shipped in under two months, following Fable 5 in early June, Sonnet 5 at the end of June, and now Opus 5 on July 24. It costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, the same price as its predecessor.

On Frontier-Bench, a coding evaluation that measures whether models can build working software from engineering drawings, Opus 5 more than doubles its predecessor’s score and surpasses every competing model, including Fable 5. On ARC-AGI 3, which tests novel problem-solving, Opus 5 scores roughly three times higher than the next-best model. On Zapier AutomationBench, which measures whether models can complete real business tasks end to end, Opus 5 passes more tasks than any rival even at its lowest effort setting.

Anthropic says Opus 5 is also its most aligned model to date, with the lowest rate of deceptive behaviour recorded in its automated safety audit. Its predecessor set a new bar for honesty when it launched in late May, and Opus 5 pushes that bar further while remaining behind Mythos 5 on offensive cybersecurity tasks. Anthropic says it intentionally avoided training the model on cyber work, though it has improved on those tasks as a side effect of becoming more generally capable.

The model is available today as the new default on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro. Developers can access it through the API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry. A Fast mode runs at two and a half times the default speed for double the base price, and two new API features ship alongside it: mid-conversation tool changes that let developers swap tools without breaking the prompt cache, and automatic fallbacks that route flagged requests to a different model instead of blocking them.

The release pace tells a broader story about where the AI model market is headed. Anthropic has gone from shipping one flagship per quarter to four models in roughly eight weeks, each targeting a different price-performance slot. Opus 5 fills the gap between the expensive Fable tier and the budget-friendly Sonnet tier, offering near-frontier intelligence for everyday coding and knowledge work without the cybersecurity restrictions that limit Fable or the access constraints that keep Mythos behind closed doors.