Anthropic launches Opus 5 with tighter cyber safeguards
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- Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on Thursday, saying it "comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains" and is much better at complex coding tasks, while inheriting cyber hardening prompted by the government's earlier cybersecurity concerns about Fable 5
- Claude Fable 5, Anthropic's public-facing Mythos-class model, was taken offline for weeks after drawing government ire, then brought back online with stronger cyber safeguards than before — and that episode kicked off "a new era of AI regulation" under the Trump administration
- Anthropic priced Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — the same as predecessor Opus 4.8, half the price of Fable 5, and slightly cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-5.6
- Opus 5 launches with a "Fast mode" research-preview feature that doubles the price for higher speeds, plus an opt-in automatic fallback to a lower-tier model when safeguards force Opus 5 to decline a user request
- Anthropic calls Opus 5 its "most aligned Opus model" and "least susceptible to being tricked into misuse," marketing it to enterprise customers for knowledge work and biology while reserving Fable 5 for long-horizon AI agent projects
- Spokesperson Danielle Ghiglieri told The Verge Anthropic "continues to work with our government partners to conduct their own independent testing of our models. This includes Opus 5," and the company noted new features that appear to address controversies over hidden usage caps and rising AI costs passed to customers
Why it matters: Enterprise customers now get a model Anthropic says nearly matches its flagship at half the price, giving them a cheaper option for everyday knowledge work while Fable 5 remains gated for the hardest tasks. But Anthropic is openly performing a two-track regulatory dance, publicly affirming independent government testing of Opus 5 even as it ships the model under commercial pressure to monetize AI infrastructure costs.
