Claude Opus 5: Pricing, Benchmarks and What Changes

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, keeping Opus 4.8's price of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens while reporting large gains on agentic coding and reasoning benchmarks. For developers already on Opus 4.8, the upgrade is a model-ID swap with no pricing change.

What launched on July 24, 2026

Claude Opus 5 (claude-opus-5) is available immediately on the Claude API, Claude Platform console, claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry, according to Anthropic's announcement. Anthropic positions it as the model for "complex agentic coding and enterprise work," one tier below Claude Fable 5, which stays the company's most capable model for long-running autonomous agents. Opus 5's reliable knowledge cutoff is May 2026, five months later than Fable 5's January 2026 cutoff, per Anthropic's model overview page.

Pricing is unchanged from Opus 4.8

Claude Opus 5 bills at the same rate as Claude Opus 4.8: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The 1-million-token context window is included at that standard rate rather than triggering a separate long-context surcharge, which is how some prior long-context tiers were priced. A new fast mode trades cost for latency: it runs at double the base per-token price and completes requests roughly 2.5x faster, per Anthropic.

For comparison, Opus 5's output price is still below OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol at $30 per million output tokens, and above Kimi K3's $15 per million. The bigger pricing story is inside Anthropic's own lineup: Opus 5 costs half of Claude Fable 5's $50-per-million-token output rate, which is the comparison Anthropic leans on in its own benchmark claims below.

Vendor-reported benchmark gains

Anthropic published five benchmark comparisons in its launch announcement. These figures are vendor-reported — Anthropic ran and published them itself, without independent third-party replication at time of writing:

• Frontier-Bench v0.1 (agentic coding): Opus 5 "more than doubles" Opus 4.8's score.
• ARC-AGI-3 (novel reasoning): roughly three times the score of the next-best model.
• CursorBench 3.2: within 0.5 percentage points of Claude Fable 5's peak score, at half of Fable 5's cost.
• Zapier AutomationBench: pass rate around 1.5x the next-best model.
• OSWorld 2.0 (computer use): surpasses Fable 5's score at just over a third of Fable 5's cost.

The consistent theme across all five is cost-efficiency relative to Fable 5 rather than an outright capability record — Opus 5 is pitched as "near-Fable-5 performance at half the price" on general tasks, with an outright agentic-coding and reasoning lead on Frontier-Bench and ARC-AGI-3 specifically.

The effort parameter and adaptive thinking

Claude Opus 5 supports Anthropic's effort parameter, which trades intelligence for token cost per request instead of picking a single fixed setting for every call. Anthropic's documentation confirms effort defaults to high on the Claude API and Claude Code for Opus 5, matching Opus 4.8's default behavior — set it explicitly to medium or low if a workload doesn't need maximum reasoning depth on every request. Opus 5 uses Anthropic's adaptive thinking rather than the older thinking.type: "enabled" extended-thinking flag, which is not supported on Opus 5 or Fable 5.

curl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
  -H "anthropic-version: 2026-07-01" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "claude-opus-5",
    "max_tokens": 4096,
    "effort": "medium",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this function for clarity."}]
  }'

Migrating from Opus 4.8

Because pricing, the 128k max-output ceiling and the Messages API shape carry over unchanged, most teams can migrate by changing the model ID:

1. Swap the model ID from claude-opus-4-8 to claude-opus-5 (or the matching Bedrock/Google Cloud identifier) in API calls and Claude Code configuration.
2. Re-check effort usage. If code explicitly sets effort for Opus 4.8, confirm the same value still fits — Opus 5's benchmark gains were measured with effort at its default high setting, so lowering it trades away some of the reported improvement.
3. Budget for fast mode selectively. At double the base price, fast mode is worth reserving for latency-sensitive paths (interactive coding sessions, live agent loops) rather than batch or background jobs, where the Message Batches API's 300k output ceiling and batch discounts matter more than speed.
4. Don't assume this replaces Fable 5. Teams already running Fable 5 for the hardest 10-20% of agentic tasks — the pattern this site recommended in its guide to AI coding agents — can likely move the bulk of everyday coding and enterprise workloads to Opus 5 at half the output cost, while keeping Fable 5 reserved for tasks where CursorBench's 0.5-point gap still matters.

What this means for developers

Opus 5 is a same-price refresh, not a new pricing tier to evaluate from scratch — the decision it forces is whether to keep splitting work between Opus and Fable tiers, or consolidate more of it onto Opus 5 given how close its vendor-reported CursorBench score sits to Fable 5's. Given Anthropic's own numbers show the gap narrowing to half a percentage point at half the cost, teams currently defaulting to Fable 5 for general coding work have a concrete reason to re-run their own benchmarks against Opus 5 before the next billing cycle.