# Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Fable 5 (2026): side-by-side comparison

Source: [GLAD-AI-TOR](https://glad-ia-tor.com) · Full page: https://glad-ia-tor.com/vs/claude-opus-5-vs-claude-fable-5
Arena: llm-models · Crowd scores are live visitor verdicts (one per person per tool, never paid, Bayesian-smoothed).

## At a glance

| | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Fable 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $25/1M out | $50/1M out |
| Crowd score | 63% (4 votes) | 63% (4 votes) |
| provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| contextWindow | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| priceIn | $5/1M in | $10/1M in |
| priceOut | $25/1M out | $50/1M out |
| modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
| openWeights | no | no |
| reasoning (1-5) | 5 | 5 |
| coding (1-5) | 5 | 5 |
| writing (1-5) | 4 | 4.5 |
| speed (1-5) | 2 | 2 |
| valueForMoney (1-5) | 4 | 3 |

### Claude Opus 5

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

Strengths:
- 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

Weaknesses:
- 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

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.

Full review: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-5 · Markdown: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-opus-5.md

### Claude Fable 5

> Anthropic's June 2026 Mythos-class flagship: 80.3% on SWE-bench Pro, 11 points clear of every other frontier model

Strengths:
- 80.3% on SWE-bench Pro vs 69.2% for Opus 4.8, 58.6% for GPT-5.5 and 54.2% for Gemini 3.1 Pro, roughly 11 points ahead of the next frontier model
- 95.0% on SWE-bench Verified (Opus 4.8: 88.6%, GPT-5.5: 82.6%) and 29.3% on Cognition's FrontierCode Diamond split, more than double Opus 4.8's 13.4%
- Long-horizon autonomy is the real story: Stripe reported a 50-million-line Ruby codebase migration done in one day instead of 2+ months, and Cursor's CEO calls it state of the art on CursorBench
- Field reports match the benchmarks: HN engineers describe it working 'like an actual engineer' (CRDTs with minimal hand-holding, writing its own fuzzers, one 46x allocation reduction), Simon Willison measured 'several days' worth of work' in a single session

Weaknesses:
- Double the price of Opus 4.8 ($10/$50 vs $5/$25) and slow: single requests on hard tasks routinely run many minutes, Simon Willison bluntly calls it 'slow, expensive'
- Dual-use safety classifiers misfire on legitimate work: a medical physicist reported fluid dynamics problems and MRI segmentation code refused as biosecurity risks, with requests silently rerouted to Opus 4.8 (the viral HN thread was titled 'If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know'; Anthropic says under 5% of sessions)
- Rocky launch: US export controls forced Anthropic to suspend access worldwide from June 12 to June 30, 2026, three days after release, with full restoration only on July 1

Verdict: Take Claude Fable 5 if your workload is genuinely long-horizon: overnight agentic runs, monster migrations, tasks where one multi-hour session replaces days of supervised work. There, the 2x premium over Opus 4.8 pays for itself in task compression, and the benchmarks (80.3% SWE-bench Pro, 11 points clear of the field) are backed by real deployments at Stripe and Cursor. For interactive coding and everyday work, stay on Opus 4.8: 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified at half the price, no classifier misfires, faster turns. Cost-sensitive teams get near-Opus coding from Sonnet 5 at $3/$15 (intro $2/$10 through August 2026). Avoid Fable 5 entirely if your org requires zero data retention or if you work anywhere near biology, medical imaging or security tooling, where the dual-use classifiers still produce false positives and silently swap in Opus 4.8 mid-session.

Full review: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-fable-5 · Markdown: https://glad-ia-tor.com/tool/claude-fable-5.md

## More

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

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