Anthropic Releases Opus 5 at Half Fable 5's Price, Adds 2.5x Faster Mode

3 articles · Updated · CNET · Jul 24

Anthropic said Opus 5 delivers its strongest work performance yet, pushing Claude closer to Fable 5 capabilities while targeting enterprise use cases such as coding, knowledge work and biology.
Half-price positioning is central to the launch: Opus 5 is priced below Fable 5, and a research-preview fast mode generates output tokens 2.5x faster at 2x standard Opus 4 pricing.
New autonomy features let the model complete tasks with less user input, double-check its own work and recover from errors, with Anthropic citing notable gains over Opus 4.8 in scientific research, especially organic chemistry.
Safety is also a selling point: Anthropic called Opus 5 its most secure model yet, added stricter guardrails and a fallback-model option for blocked prompts, and let developers change tool access midconversation without breaking prompt cache.
The release lands in a broader AI model race after Google and OpenAI rolled out newer, more efficient systems earlier this month, sharpening pressure on vendors to improve both performance and cost.