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Quick Answer

Claude Opus 5: Pricing, Benchmarks & What Changed

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The Short Answer

Claude Opus 5 launched July 24, 2026 at $5 / $25 per million tokens — the same price as Opus 4.8 and half the cost of Fable 5. It offers near-Fable-5 intelligence, a 1M-token context window, and state-of-the-art agentic coding, and is now the default Opus model across the Claude API, AWS Bedrock, and the Claude apps.

What Changed vs Opus 4.8

Same price, meaningfully more model:

  • Deep reasoning — a “step-change” in sustaining multi-step analysis across complex problems.
  • Agentic coding & long-horizon tasks — holds focus over extended tool-use sessions, completes multi-file features and large refactors without leaving loose ends, and recovers from its own errors.
  • Self-correction — catches its own mistakes and pushes back on unsound plans more reliably.
  • Effort toggle — low / medium / high / xhigh / max, so you trade quality for cost per call.
  • Alignment — Anthropic’s “most aligned model to date,” with lower deceptive-behavior rates.
  • Developer features — mid-conversation tool changes (beta), a default fallbacks mode (beta), and a lower prompt-cache minimum (512 tokens, down from 1,024).

Unchanged: $5/$25 pricing, 1M-token context, and 128K max output — the same envelope as Opus 4.8.

Benchmarks (as of July 2026)

BenchmarkClaude Opus 5
Frontier-Bench (SOTA)43.3%
ARC-AGI-330.2%
SWE-bench Pro79.2%
Artificial Analysis Coding Index78.0% (better than 99% of models)
CursorBenchwithin ~0.5% of Fable 5

In head-to-head comparisons, Opus 5 outperforms GPT-5.6 Sol on six benchmarks including agentic coding and computer use, while GPT-5.6 Sol retains a lead on terminal coding (Terminal-Bench 2.1). Note: Anthropic did not publish an official SWE-bench Verified or Terminal-Bench figure for Opus 5 at launch — the SWE-bench Pro number above is from third-party runs.

Pricing in Context

Model$/MTok in$/MTok out30K-in/5K-out task*
Claude Opus 5$5$25~$0.28
Claude Opus 4.8$5$25~$0.28
Claude Fable 5$10$50~$0.55
GPT-5.6 Sol$5$30~$0.30
Claude Sonnet 5 (intro)$2$10~$0.11

Task-cost math = 30×(in/1000) + 5×(out/1000).

Who Should Use It

  • Complex coding, multi-repo refactors, long-horizon agents → Opus 5 is now the strongest Opus.
  • Document-heavy enterprise analysis → notable accuracy gains over 4.8.
  • Cost-sensitive daily work → still consider Sonnet 5 ($2/$10 intro) and escalate to Opus 5 on failure.
  • Peak-benchmark coding regardless of cost → Fable 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol still edge specific leaderboards.

Sources