Claude Opus 5 just launched, bringing near-Fable 5 intelligence at half the price, plus a new effort toggle that lets you control cost and capability per task. Here's what changed, how to access it, and how it stacks up against Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, and Fable 5.
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Opus 5 is Anthropic's new everyday, professional-tier model, positioned as a thoughtful, proactive assistant built for daily business use rather than chasing the absolute top of the leaderboard at any cost. Anthropic describes it as coming close to Fable 5's frontier intelligence while running at roughly half the price of a comparable top-tier model.
It's part of a rapid release stretch. Mythos 5 and Fable 5 launched in June, Sonnet 5 followed shortly after, and Opus 5 is the fourth model in this family to ship in under two months, each one aimed at a different point on the capability-versus-cost curve.
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This is the feature most worth understanding before you start using Opus 5 seriously.
Rather than picking one model for everything, the practical approach is matching effort level to the task, saving high effort for the handful of requests each day that genuinely need it.
The chart worth internalizing before you decide anything: Opus 5 costs exactly the same as Opus 4.8, while delivering better benchmarks. Fable 5 costs roughly double for its extra ceiling. Sonnet 5 remains the budget option.
| Opus 4.8 | Sonnet 5 | Opus 5 | Fable 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Released | May 28, 2026 | June 30, 2026 | July 24, 2026 |
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Frontier-Bench | 43.3%, new state of the art |
| ARC-AGI-3 | 30.2% |
| GDPval-AA | New state of the art for coding and knowledge work |
The practical read: Opus 5 gets close to or matches Fable 5 on intelligence while costing meaningfully less per task, which is the whole point of the effort toggle, you're paying for exactly the capability a given task needs.
Sourced from Anthropic's official announcement and Artificial Analysis's independent testing. Data current as of July 27, 2026, check the links above for updates.
| June 9, 2026 |
| Positioning | Previous flagship | Near-Opus performance, lower cost | Efficient daily driver | Frontier, Mythos-class |
| Pricing (per million tokens) | $5 / $25 | $2 / $10 | $5 / $25 | $10 / $50 |
| Effort control | No | No | Yes, low/medium/high | Adaptive thinking, always on |
| Best for | Legacy workloads | Cost-sensitive everyday tasks | Daily professional use with cost control | Longest, most demanding tasks |
| Cybersecurity tasks |
| Still trails Mythos 5 |
| Intelligence Index | Narrowly the most intelligent model tested, comparable to Fable 5 at 26% lower cost per task |
| GDPval-AA v2 (max effort) | 1861 Elo, +114 over Fable 5 |
| AA-Briefcase (agentic knowledge work) | 1720 Elo, +146 over Fable 5 |
| Coding Agent Index (xhigh, with Claude Code) | Joint first place, highest score on SWE-Atlas-QnA |
| Average cost per Intelligence Index task | $2.03 (max), vs $2.75 Fable 5, $1.80 Opus 4.8, $1.53 Sonnet 5 |
| Effort scaling on GDPval-AA v2 | 407 Elo points separate low from max effort, output tokens vary roughly 8x |
