Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 delivers near-Fable 5 performance at half the token price
Anthropic’s new flagship model, Claude Opus 5, posts top scores in coding and knowledge work while approaching Claude Fable 5’s performance at half its token rates. Anthropic is responding to pricing pressure from GPT-5.6 Sol and Chinese competitors.
Its new Opus 5 model is designed to close the price-performance gap with the much pricier Fable 5. Opus 5 becomes the default model on Claude Max and the most capable model available on Claude Pro. The 1 million-token context window and token rates remain unchanged. Like its predecessor Opus 4.8, Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. A new Fast Mode increases speed by 2.5x but doubles the price.Ad Token rates don’t tell the full story without factoring in token efficiency. Opus 4.7 ended up costing 30 to 40 percent more per task than Opus 4.6, even though both models had the same base rates. A similar pattern showed up recently with Claude Sonnet 5. Update: Early independent benchmarks back up Anthropic’s claims. Opus 5 costs less than Fable 5 while often performing better, and it also beats both Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 on price and performance.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 Users can trade off performance against token use through five effort settings called low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. Anthropic says Opus 5 offers better value than its predecessor at every effort level. In its prompting guide, Anthropic recommends making broad use of the “low” and “medium” settings. The company says they deliver good results with a fraction of the token use and latency while beating the same settings on earlier Opus models. For coding and agentic tasks, Anthropic still recommends starting with “xhigh.”Ad Opus 5 scores slightly worse at the max effort setting than at the second-highest setting on two benchmarks, despite costing more. The drop appears on Frontier-Bench v0.1 and the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index. Update: According to FrontierCode developer Cheng-Yuan Lee, this behavior is expected. The benchmark doesn’t just grade correctness but also whether a model makes only the minimum necessary changes to the code. At higher effort levels, Opus 5 tends to refactor surrounding code even when only a small fix is needed.
