Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5 at Half the Price of Prior Model

Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 5 on Friday, positioning the artificial intelligence model as its most cost-effective offering while maintaining competitive performance across industry benchmarks.

The new model costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens—half the price of its predecessor, Claude Fable 5, which Anthropic released in June. According to the company, Opus 5 outperforms Fable 5 on coding and knowledge work evaluations and is "designed to be used every day," details first reported by CNBC.

Why it matters

The pricing strategy reflects a broader shift in the AI industry as enterprise customers demand clearer return on investment before committing to expensive models. Anthropic faces mounting pressure from competitors including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Chinese startups that emphasize affordability. By cutting costs while preserving quality, Anthropic aims to appeal to businesses that have grown more cautious about AI experimentation without proven value.

Strategic positioning amid competition

Dianne Penn, Anthropic's head of product management for research, told CNBC that enterprises are actively seeking value in AI deployments. "If it's a cheaper model or a cheaper offering, but it's not accomplishing a similar level of quality, it's actually not useful," Penn said.

The launch comes as both Anthropic and rival OpenAI work to address customer concerns about cost-effectiveness in an increasingly competitive market.

Capability limitations by design

Anthropics stated that Opus 5 is not state-of-the-art for "risky, dual-use capabilities" such as cybersecurity applications. The model remains behind Claude Mythos 5—a more capable but restricted model—in offensive cybersecurity and biology research.

This positioning follows intense scrutiny Anthropic faced after releasing Claude Mythos Preview in April to select users. That model demonstrated advanced capabilities in discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities, raising national security concerns.

Recent regulatory challenges

In June, Anthropic had to temporarily disable access to both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 shortly after their release to comply with an export control directive citing national security authorities. Access was restored after approximately two weeks of negotiations with government agencies.

Penn confirmed that Anthropic continues collaborating with government agencies on pre-deployment testing and evaluation, including for Opus 5.

The details of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 launch were first reported by CNBC.