Claude Opus 5: near-Fable intelligence at half the price
July 25, 20262 min readPosted by Federico Ulfo
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 on Thursday, describing it as a "thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price". The company says it "comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains" while being considerably cheaper.
It currently sits #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Leaderboard.
The fine print
Ars Technica reads the release as being about token efficiency rather than a capability leap — the cheaper options are increasingly good enough. TechCrunch adds that Opus 5 is not only cheaper than Fable but less restrictive, which for most workloads matters more than the top-line score.
Simon Willison, who was offline kayaking with sea otters for the launch, hadn't put it through its paces yet but called the buzz positive.
Sources: Anthropic, Ars Technica, The Verge, TechCrunch, Simon Willison, HN discussion