Anthropic releases Opus 5 with ‘close’ to Fable 5’s capabilities
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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 significantly outperforms its predecessor on complex coding tasks.
- Opus 5 ships with stronger cybersecurity safeguards than Opus 4.8 and is marketed as 'the most aligned Opus model and the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse,' a direct response to the Fable 5 controversy.
- Pricing for Opus 5 holds at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — unchanged from its predecessor, half the price of Fable 5, and slightly cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-5.6.
- Anthropic launched a 'Fast mode' for Opus 5 in research preview at double the price, plus an opt-in automatic fallback to a lower-tier model when safeguards force Opus 5 to decline a request.
- Fable 5, the public-facing Mythos-class model that triggered the government's cybersecurity concerns, was taken offline for weeks alongside Mythos 5 before returning with even stronger safeguards.
- Anthropic says it continues to work with government partners on independent model testing, including Opus 5, contrasting with OpenAI's GPT-5.6, which rolled out for roughly two weeks only to government-approved entities.
- Anthropic is pitching Opus 5 to enterprise customers as its everyday model for knowledge work and biology, while reserving Fable 5 for the most ambitious long-horizon AI agent projects.
Why it matters: Enterprise buyers now get near-flagship performance at $5/$25 per million tokens — half of Fable 5 — but the launch doubles down on the new cyber-safeguards regime, with Anthropic explicitly marketing Opus 5 as 'the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse' and confirming independent government testing on this rollout. A new 'Fast mode' at double the price and automatic-fallback tiers show Anthropic building finer pricing segments under that regulatory constraint.
