# Claude Opus 5 arrives with near Fable performance at half the price

_Friday, July 24, 2026 at 8:00 AM EDT · AI · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![Claude Opus 5 arrives with near Fable performance at half the price — Primary](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/682a9bf845fbfc894b8843f80efe4e43cedacd5a/2026/07/23/4b6d69e3-8158-4c72-8e7c-022e5bd4f2db/opus-5-use-2.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&height=675&width=1200)

Anthropic announced Thursday the release of Claude Opus 5, a model the company says delivers near Fable 5 performance at half the price. The company said Opus 5 comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains and has the strongest knowledge work performance of any model it has released.

Anthropic said pricing remains the same as Opus 4.8 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The model is available now to all user tiers that previously had access to Opus 4.8. The company said it expects Opus 5 to be the daily driver, especially in the enterprise.

Cursor co-founder Sualeh Asif said Opus 5 delivers near Fable 5 intelligence at Opus speed and cost. Harvey head of applied research Niko Grupen said the model is a clear step up in performance on legal agent work and maintains quality at lower reasoning levels, generating 26% fewer tokens on average compared to Opus 4.8 at max reasoning. Stripe software engineer Cristian Rivera called Opus 5 a clear generational step up from Opus 4.8.

Anthropic also announced a fast mode research preview for Opus 5 with 150% faster token generation at double the standard price. The company introduced automatic fallbacks when a safety classifier declines a request and mid-conversation tool changes that allow developers to swap external tools without losing the prompt cache.

## Sources

- [ZDNET](https://www.zdnet.com/article/claude-opus-5-near-fable-performance-at-half-the-price/)

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Retrieved: 2026-07-24T21:17:19.669Z
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