Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 as a cheaper mid-tier flagship model

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, a mid-tier flagship model available immediately through the Claude application programming interface (API). It is the default model on Claude Max and the strongest option on Claude Pro.

Pricing holds at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, unchanged from Opus 4.8, with a “fast mode” that runs 2.5 times faster at twice the base price. Anthropic is positioning Opus 5 as an efficient workhorse that sits below Claude Fable 5, which remains its most capable model.

The pitch is that Opus 5 closes much of that gap for far less money. Anthropic says the model comes within 0.5% of Fable 5 on the CursorBench 3.2 coding benchmark at half the cost, outperforms it on the OSWorld 2.0 agent benchmark at one-third the cost, scores more than double Opus 4.8’s result on the company’s internal Frontier-Bench v0.1, and scores three times higher than the next-best model on ARC-AGI 3.

Those figures are Anthropic’s own and have not been independently verified; an internal benchmark like Frontier-Bench is defined by the vendor and does not compare directly across labs.

Unlike Fable 5, Opus 5 carries no 30-day data-retention requirement, a distinction likely to matter to enterprise buyers weighing coding agents and automated workflows.