Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5: Near-Frontier Intelligence at Half the Cost

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, describing it as a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.

The Headline

Claude Opus 5 is available immediately across all of Anthropic's platforms — claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude API — at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, unchanged from its predecessor Opus 4.8. Fable 5, by comparison, charges $10 per million input tokens.

Key Capabilities

The model ships with a 1M-token context window as both default and maximum, extended thinking on by default, and a new per-request effort toggle (low, medium, high) that lets users balance cost against capability.

Launch benchmarks are striking:

• SWE-bench Verified: 96.0%

• SWE-bench Pro: 79.2%, within a point of Mythos 5 (80.3%) and Fable 5 (80.0%)

• Frontier-Bench v0.1: 43.3%, ahead of Fable 5's 33.7%

• ARC-AGI-3: 30.2%, roughly three times the next-best model

Positioning

Opus 5 becomes the new default model on Claude Max, Anthropic's premium consumer tier, and the strongest model available on Claude Pro. Anthropic recommends Fable 5 only for long-horizon agents running autonomously for days, and Sonnet 5 for high-volume, well-scoped tasks.

Why It Matters

This is the fourth model Anthropic has shipped in under two months, following Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5 in June — an aggressive cadence that now covers every point on the cost-capability curve with a current-generation model, as the company reportedly prepares for an IPO later this year.