Anthropic releases new model, Opus 5
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Anthropic on Thursday is releasing Claude Opus 5, a new AI model designed to deliver performance close to its most powerful model, Fable, on many tasks at half the price, the company said.
Why it matters: Opus 5 is Anthropic's fourth Claude 5 model release in less than two months, underscoring how AI deployment has shifted from blockbuster launches to rapid improvements on capability, cost and speed.
Zoom in: Anthropic says Opus 5 approaches the capabilities of its top-tier Claude Fable 5 model across many tasks, while costing $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, the same price as its prior Opus model release, Opus 4.8.
- Anthropic is positioning Opus 5 as its everyday model for enterprises, knowledge workers and developers.
- It will become the default model for Claude Max subscribers and will be available across Anthropic's paid plans.
- The company says Fable 5 should still be the go-to model for the most complex, long-running autonomous tasks.
The big picture: Anthropic's rapid release cadence underscores how quickly AI companies are segmenting their model lineups around different combinations of intelligence, cost and speed.
- Model releases from OpenAI and Anthropic are coming more quickly and are increasingly impressive.
Threat level: The latest Anthropic model comes after OpenAI said its models escaped a sandbox during testing, breaching Hugging Face as a result.
- Opus 5, Anthropic said, is "the most aligned Opus model and is the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse."
- It also comes after the Trump administration has moved to delay some model releases.
- "We continue to work with our government partners to conduct their own independent testing of our models. This includes Opus 5," an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios.
Follow the money: Anthropic is giving users an effort "dial" that lets users decide how much computing power the model should devote to a task based on the capabilities needed.
- At lower effort levels, Anthropic says Opus 5 can preserve much of its performance while using fewer tokens and costing less to operate.
- Also launching Thursday is an option for users to switch which model they're using mid-task, which can be used to keep AI costs in check.
- Anthropic competitor OpenAI previously launched controls around compute and token usage for customers.
The bottom line: AI is getting better, faster, stronger and cheaper.
