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

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.

Popular Stories

1password anthropic integration

1Password for Claude Lets AI Log In Without Seeing Your Passwords

Thursday July 16, 2026 10:38 am PDT by
Popular password management app 1Password today added Claude support, which means AI service Claude can access credentials stored in 1Password for completing browser tasks. With the integration, Claude can use 1Password logins and one-time codes without the actual password being exposed to Claude. Passwords never reach Claude's context, memory, or Anthropic's systems. When Claude wants to ...
claude code ios simulator

Claude Code Can Now Build and Test iOS Apps in Apple's Simulator

Tuesday July 21, 2026 4:46 pm PDT by
Anthropic today said Claude Code for desktop has been updated to work with the iOS Simulator, with the integration available in public beta. Claude Code can open in-progress apps in the iOS Simulator pane when it's instructed to build, run, or check an app. Claude can watch the iOS Simulator live as it runs, interact with it, and then iterate until a project is finished. Developers can...
claude voice

Claude Voice Mode Gains Opus and Sonnet Model Support

Friday July 24, 2026 5:10 am PDT by
Anthropic has updated Claude's voice mode to support its more powerful Opus and Sonnet models, expanding a feature that was previously limited to the company's fastest-but-simplest model, Haiku. Voice mode lets users hold full spoken conversations with the chatbot rather than having to type prompts and read responses. Users can switch between Claude's models mid-conversation, and can also...

Top Rated Comments

2 weeks ago

I’m falling behind! What the heck are input and output tokens?
When you use an AI it translates your natural language words into small chunks of text (words, parts of words, and punctuation). What you input to the AI gets translated into input tokens. Those are fed into the AI's neural network, which produces output tokens, which of course are translated back into natural language. A good rule of thumb is that one token is about three-quarters of an English word, so 100 words is roughly 130 tokens.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ChamomileTea Avatar
2 weeks ago

Need an AI filter for the story feed, this isn't even an apple product?
Apple should have bought Anthropic when they could!
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
capamac Avatar
2 weeks ago

Apple should have bought Anthropic when they could!
The llm companies make zero money and will all be bankrupt within a year.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
definitive Avatar
2 weeks ago
that's awesome!

...so do we get cheaper ram now?
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
capamac Avatar
2 weeks ago
Personally, I am willing to pay $0 per month for this silly pseudointellgence.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
2 weeks ago

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.
Simplifying a lot here, but this is my mental model:

* Fable, Sol, and Opus are now roughly equivalent in performance.
* Fable costs ~ 2x compared to Sol and Opus in API pricing.
* OpenAI subsidies cost of their monthly plans significantly more than Anthropic

With this, ChatGPT Pro plan (either $100 or $200/m) remains the best deal on the market for now when you need access to the most intelligent models.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)