Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5 at half price of flagship

On Friday, July 24, 2026, artificial intelligence company Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, a new version of its large language model that it says delivers performance close to its most powerful public offering, Fable 5, at half the cost. The release continues a rapid upgrade cadence for the San Francisco-based startup, a chief rival to OpenAI and Google, coming just two months after the previous Opus 4.8 model.

Anthropic positions Opus 5 as a model built for daily use, offering what it calls frontier intelligence for a broader range of customers. The company stated the new model is its strongest yet for knowledge work and shows substantial improvements in complex coding tasks and scientific research over its predecessor. Specific gains were noted in areas like organic chemistry and predicting protein functions. The model is also designed to work more autonomously, with an enhanced ability to verify its own work, recover from errors, and iterate on tasks with less user intervention.

A key distinction from the more powerful Fable 5 is a lighter set of safeguards. Anthropic said its automated safety filters will intervene roughly 85 percent less often for Opus 5, addressing user...