On July 24, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, the new generation of its Opus family. It launched day one on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry, claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork, as the default model on Claude Max and the most capable model included in Claude Pro. The headline is economic as much as technical: near-frontier intelligence at half the price of Claude Fable 5. Opus 5 debuts at number one in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and on SWE-bench Verified, while keeping the same $5/$25 per million tokens list price as Opus 4.8. In this guide we break down the benchmarks, the pricing, the new five-level effort selector, where Opus 5 sits in Anthropic's lineup, what changes for developers, and what it means for businesses building with AI.
Claude Opus 5 (model ID claude-opus-5) is a text and vision model with a knowledge cutoff of May 2026, the most recent of Anthropic's lineup. The essentials at a glance:
Anthropic's official numbers show a large jump over Opus 4.8 and a lead over both Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on most fronts:
Third-party evaluations back this up. On Vals AI's SWE-bench Verified leaderboard (July 22), Opus 5 scores 97.0%, taking the number one spot. Artificial Analysis measures an Intelligence Index of 61 at max effort, the highest in the world, ahead of Claude Fable 5, with a throughput of 56.3 tokens per second and 64.5 seconds to first token at max effort.
One caveat on completeness: LMArena has no ranking for Opus 5 yet, because the model has only been out for a day. Expect that picture to fill in over the coming weeks.
Anthropic held the line on price: Opus 5 costs exactly the same as Opus 4.8 and half as much as Claude Fable 5 ($10/$50).
The biggest API-level novelty is the new effort selector with five levels: low, medium, high, xhigh and max, with high as the default. More effort means more thinking, more latency and more capability: Artificial Analysis measures an Intelligence Index of 56 at medium effort, 59 at high and 61 at max.
There is one restriction to know: disabling thinking is only compatible with effort high or lower, and combining disabled thinking with xhigh or max returns a 400 error. Remember also that adaptive thinking is now enabled by default, a breaking change versus Opus 4.8.
For production systems the effort selector is a cost lever: run the long tail of routine requests at low or medium effort, and reserve max for the decisions that justify the extra latency and spend.
Opus 5 closes most of the gap to Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price. Fable 5 stays ahead on DeepSWE (69.7% vs 68.8%) and remains the reference model for agents on very long-horizon runs.
At the top of the range, Claude Mythos 5, available only through Project Glasswing, remains far ahead in offensive cybersecurity and autonomous biology. For everything else, Opus 5 is now the value pick of the frontier tier.
Opus 5 also records the lowest misaligned-behavior score of any Claude model to date (2.3), a relevant data point for teams deploying agents in regulated environments.
If you run Opus 4.8 or older Opus models in production, here is what to plan for:
The practical shift is economic. Coding agents and knowledge-work automation that needed Fable 5 quality now run at Opus prices: near-frontier reasoning at $5/$25 per million tokens changes which automations are worth building at all.
The effort selector adds a second lever. Instead of paying top prices for every request, you tune capability per call: routine steps run at low or medium effort, and only the genuinely hard decisions escalate to max, all on the same model and the same integration.
As always, published benchmarks are a starting point, not a decision. The numbers that matter are the ones on your own workloads, measured before you commit an architecture to a model.
We don't build demos: we ship AI agents and automations into production. A release like Claude Opus 5 moves the cost-quality frontier, and we fold it into architectures designed around each client's privacy, cost and reliability constraints.
If you are weighing Opus 5 against Fable 5, GPT-5.6 or an open model, we can benchmark them on your real use cases and build the routing and fallback architecture around the winner.
Claude Opus 5 lands as the new number one in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and on SWE-bench Verified, at the same price as Opus 4.8 and half the price of Claude Fable 5, with a five-level effort selector that turns capability into a dial rather than a model choice.
Fable 5 keeps the edge on DeepSWE and on ultra-long agent runs, and Mythos 5 remains the Project Glasswing specialist, but for most coding and knowledge-work agents Opus 5 is now the default candidate to evaluate first.
If you are planning an AI agent or an automation and want to know what Opus 5 changes for your roadmap, we can help you evaluate it and build the production architecture around it.