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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Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5.5 With Fable-Level Performance at a Lower Price

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Top Rated Comments

13 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: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ChamomileTea Avatar
13 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
13 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
13 weeks ago
that's awesome!

...so do we get cheaper ram now?
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
capamac Avatar
13 weeks ago
Personally, I am willing to pay $0 per month for this silly pseudointellgence.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
13 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)
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