Anthropic's New Claude Opus 5 Nearly Matches Flagship Fable 5 at Half the Cost - MacRumors
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Anthropic's New Claude Opus 5 Nearly Matches Flagship Fable 5 at Half the Cost

Anthropic today introduced Claude Opus 5, an upgrade to Opus 4.8. Anthropic says Opus 5 was built for daily use, and it offers near Fable 5 performance at half the price. Fable 5 is Anthropic's most capable publicly available model.

claude opus 5
Opus 5 scores higher than Opus 4.8 on multiple benchmarked tasks, including agentic coding, novel problem solving, knowledge work, computer use, and multidisciplinary reasoning. It is a "meaningful improvement" over Opus 4.8 for scientific research, and it can produce better visual outputs.

Anthropic says the new model "provides greatly improved performance for the same cost" as Opus 4.8. Opus 5 is better at verifying its work and iterating until it completes a task. It is close to Mythos 5 at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but it was not trained on cyber tasks and it remains "substantially behind" Mythos 5 on exploitation. Mythos 5 is Fable 5 with some safeguards removed. It is limited to a small number of organizations, mostly cyberdefenders and infrastructure providers because of its capability at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

Opus 5 is available on all platforms. It is the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model available on Claude Pro. It is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, which is the same as Opus 4.8. Fast mode is also available, running at 2.5x the default speed for twice the base price.

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Top Rated Comments

ChamomileTea Avatar
2 hours ago at 12:06 pm

Need an AI filter for the story feed, this isn't even an apple product?
Apple should have bought Anthropic when they could!
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ChamomileTea Avatar
2 hours ago at 12:05 pm
Not very good in a market where competition is fierce.

In DeepSWE, GPT 5.6 Sol still performs better, and the gap in other benchmarks isn’t big.

Plus, OpenAI offers more tokens with your subscription, which is big a plus.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DogHouseDub Avatar
3 hours ago at 11:30 am
Fable uses a ton of compute power - Opus is more efficient and sufficient for most people's needs. Those of us working in the biological sciences can't use Fable anyway, as we're blocked.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Mitthrawnuruodo Avatar
3 hours ago at 11:28 am
Hope it's better than Sonnet 5 - which I've used the most of late. Sonnet 5 is hallucinating wildly all the time (on almost any and all topics).

If Opus 5 is a bit more reliable, it may go back to being my default model in Claude.

Not really given Fable 5 a (thorough) spin, either, it burns through the 5 hour session limit just a bit too quickly on the Pro plan, and now requires extra credits. I do have a project in mind to test it though, for next week. (After receiving $100 in "free" spending from Anthropic.)
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)