# Claude Opus 5: pricing, crowd verdict, pros and cons (2026)

> Anthropic's July 2026 Opus refresh: near-Fable 5 intelligence at half the price, same $5/$25 as Opus 4.8

Source: [GLAD-AI-TOR](https://glad-ia-tor.com) · Full page: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-5
Arena: llm-models · Crowd score: 63% recommend (4 votes, Bayesian-smoothed) · Price: $25/1M out

Released 2026-07-24 as the direct replacement for Opus 4.8 in Anthropic's Series 5 lineup (Mythos 5, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5). API ID claude-opus-5: $5/$25 per 1M tokens (unchanged from Opus 4.8), 1M context as both default and maximum, 128K max output, thinking on by default with a five-level effort scale (low to max). Positioned as near-frontier intelligence at half the price of Fable 5: it actually beats Fable 5 on Frontier-Bench (43.3% vs 33.7%) and GDPval-AA v2 (Elo 1861 vs 1747) while trailing it slightly on SWE-bench Pro (79.2% vs 80.0%). Safety classifiers trigger 85% less often than on Fable 5, and a default fallback mode avoids silent refusal errors.

## Key facts

- provider: Anthropic
- contextWindow: 1M tokens
- priceIn: $5/1M in
- priceOut: $25/1M out
- modalities: text, vision
- openWeights: no

## Ratings (editorial, 1-5)

- reasoning: 5/5
- coding: 5/5
- writing: 4/5
- speed: 2/5
- valueForMoney: 4/5

## Pros

- Ranked #1 in composite intelligence across 190 models on Artificial Analysis at launch, and 43.3% on Frontier-Bench v0.1 vs 34.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 33.7% for Claude Fable 5
- 3.9x better than GPT-5.6 Sol on ARC-AGI-3 novel reasoning (30.2% vs 7.8%), and Elo 1861 on GDPval-AA v2 economic knowledge work, ahead of Fable 5 (1747)
- 79.2% on SWE-bench Pro, within a point of Fable 5 (80.0%) and 10 points above Opus 4.8 (69.2%), at half Fable's price; Cursor's co-founder calls it 'near Fable 5 intelligence at Opus speed and cost'
- Same $5/$25 pricing as Opus 4.8 with a bigger window: 1M context is now the default and only tier, with 128K max output and prompt caching from 512 tokens
- Dual-use safety classifiers trigger 85% less often than on Fable 5, and the new default fallback mode avoids the silent mid-session refusals that plagued Fable's launch
- Self-verifies its work without being told, handles mid-conversation tool changes (beta) without busting the prompt cache, and ships day one on Claude.ai, the API, Bedrock, Vertex and Microsoft Foundry

## Cons

- Notably slow and very verbose: 52.6 output tokens/s and 68 seconds to first token on Artificial Analysis, and it consumed ~100M output tokens during their eval vs a 63M median
- The verbosity is a real-world cost problem: CodeRabbit measured it reading ~50% more and writing ~65% more than reference frontier models per code-review call
- No actual price cut despite the 'cost-efficient' narrative: identical to Opus 4.8 ($5/$25), nearly GPT-5.6 money ($5/$30), and more than 2x comparable Gemini or Grok tiers
- Reviewers describe a 'brilliant but annoying' personality: over-verification, hedging, and occasional refusals of mundane tasks like resolving a merge conflict (Lenny's Newsletter field review)
- Breaking API change for Opus 4.8 migrants: thinking is on by default and cannot be disabled at xhigh or max effort (returns a 400); Fast mode ($10/$50, ~2.5x faster) is API-only, not on Bedrock or Vertex

## Best for

- everyday frontier coding and agents without Fable 5 pricing
- enterprise knowledge work (documents, spreadsheets, decks)
- teams hitting Fable 5 classifier false positives
- multi-agent orchestration and writer-verifier patterns

## Verdict

Claude Opus 5 is the sane default of the Series 5 range: most of Fable 5's intelligence (and more than Fable on Frontier-Bench and GDPval) at exactly half the token price, with classifiers that trigger 85% less often. If you migrated workloads to Fable 5 for capability but resent the bill or the false-positive refusals, move them here; if you are still on Opus 4.8, the upgrade is 10 SWE-bench Pro points for free. The two honest reasons to look elsewhere: latency and verbosity. At 52.6 tokens/s with 68s to first token it is a poor fit for interactive UX, and its token appetite quietly inflates real costs beyond the sticker price, so budget-sensitive high-volume pipelines still belong on Sonnet 5, Gemini or DeepSeek. Keep Fable 5 only for the longest autonomous runs where its slight SWE-bench Pro edge compounds.

## Pricing note

Official Anthropic API list price for claude-opus-5: $5/1M input, $25/1M output, unchanged from Opus 4.8, single tier with 1M context as default and maximum, 128K max output, prompt caching from 512 tokens. Research-preview Fast mode at $10/$50 (~2.5x faster) is Claude API only. Verified against platform.claude.com (What's new in Opus 5) 2026-07.

## Alternatives and head-to-heads

- [Claude Haiku 4.5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-haiku-4-5) (crowd score 67%) · [Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Haiku 4.5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-5-vs-claude-haiku-4-5)
- [Claude Fable 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-fable-5) (crowd score 63%) · [Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Fable 5](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-5-vs-claude-fable-5)
- [Kimi K3](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/kimi-k3) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K3](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-5-vs-kimi-k3)
- [Claude Opus 4.7](https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-4-7) (crowd score 57%) · [Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 4.7](https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-5-vs-claude-opus-4-7)

Full ranking: https://glad-ia-tor.com/hall-of-fame/llm-models

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