Claude Opus 5

Claude Opus 5 is one of the AI models made by Anthropic. Anthropic runs an AI brand called Claude, which includes several tiers of models, and Opus 5 is one of them—similar to how a car company sells multiple trims under the same brand.

Launched in August 2026, Opus 5 is notable for being priced far lower than Anthropic's flagship model, Fable 5. Measured per million tokens (the basic units used to process text), input costs $5 and output costs $25—half the price of Fable 5. It's essentially a value-oriented model: not top-tier in performance, but solid enough to be useful, at a lower price.

This pricing strategy is driven by competition. As cheap Chinese models from companies like Moonshot and DeepSeek rapidly close the performance gap, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are being pushed to lower prices to retain customers.

Articles describe it along the lines of "Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its flagship model, Fable 5." Here, Opus 5 is cited as a signal that Anthropic has started competing on price rather than performance alone, and it's worth noting that Anthropic built the model itself—not Amazon or Google, which merely supply the servers.

Open the model selection menu in any app or website that offers Claude, and check whether a name like Opus 5 appears. Try sending the same question to different model tiers and compare the speed and depth of their answers to get a feel for the differences between tiers.

Example prompts: try a demanding task like "Review this complex contract clause and list the risks," alongside a simple one like "Suggest an outfit for today's weather," and compare the responses.