Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's near-frontier model, released July 24, 2026, that reaches close to Fable 5 intelligence at half the price. The model costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, unchanged from its predecessor Opus 4.8, but Anthropic claims it delivers significantly stronger performance across coding, reasoning, and knowledge work tasks.

What Makes Claude Opus 5 Different From Earlier Versions?

The defining change in Claude Opus 5 is an effort dial paired with extended thinking that now runs by default. Developers can set a low, medium, or high effort level per request, raising reasoning compute for hard problems or lowering it to conserve tokens on routine work. Because extended thinking is on by default, the same request emits more tokens than it did on Opus 4.8, so an identical price per token can still produce a larger invoice.

The model features a 1 million token context window as both default and maximum, allowing it to work across large codebases, long documents, and multi-step agent runs without losing earlier context. Standard maximum output is 128,000 tokens. Anthropic also shipped Fast mode, which runs Opus 5 at roughly 2.5 times default speed for twice the base price.

How Does Claude Opus 5 Perform on Real-World Tasks?

Claude Opus 5 leads on agentic and knowledge-work benchmarks while sitting just behind Fable 5 on a few coding evaluations. On the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite of nine evaluations, Opus 5 ranks first with a score of 63 at maximum effort as of August 2026. Anthropic reports it as state-of-the-art on Frontier-Bench v0.1 and GDPval-AA, where it more than doubles Opus 4.8's result at a lower cost per task.

The single most-cited result is ARC-AGI-3, an evaluation of how well a model solves novel problems it has not seen. Anthropic reports Opus 5 scoring roughly three times the next-best model, a jump large enough that it reads as a capability arriving rather than one improving. On computer use, Anthropic says Opus 5 surpasses Fable 5's best OSWorld 2.0 result at just over a third of the cost.

One boundary is worth stating plainly: Opus 5 is not the cybersecurity leader. Anthropic's own disclosure places it behind the Mythos tier on offensive cyber tasks, the one category where it does not claim the top Claude spot.

How to Choose Between Claude Models for Your Needs

• Agentic Coding and Long-Horizon Reasoning: Claude Opus 5 is positioned for everyday use in large codebases, multi-step agents, and demanding knowledge work where accuracy pays for itself. It owns the daily-agent cluster of terminal coding, knowledge work, novel problems, search, and desktop control.
• Specialist Peaks and Frontier Work: Reach for a higher tier only when your work sits at the specialist peaks. Mythos-tier science and offensive cybersecurity still call for the top of the range, and the longest autonomous agent horizons may justify Fable 5.
• High-Volume Routine Work: Step down to Sonnet 5 when most of your work is routine and high-volume, where its cost curve wins. For most production work between those extremes, Opus 5 is now the default choice.

Claude Opus 5 fits teams shipping products in large codebases, running multi-step agents, or doing demanding knowledge work where accuracy pays for itself. Anthropic positions it as the everyday model, and the benchmark pattern backs that claim. The identical pricing to Opus 4.8 removes the usual reason to hesitate when migrating from the previous version.

Two features from Opus 4.8 do not carry over, and both matter before you migrate. Anthropic released two beta updates alongside the model: mid-conversation tool changes and automatic API fallbacks, which route requests flagged by safety classifiers to another model rather than blocking them.

Claude Opus 5 is now available on Emergent, the AI app-building platform, through the Universal LLM Key. It is also the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro. The release represents a shift in Anthropic's strategy toward pricing parity rather than capability jumps, making the near-frontier tier accessible to teams that previously had to choose between Opus 4.8 and the significantly more expensive Fable 5.