Anthropic just released Claude Opus 5, a new flagship model that competes directly with Fable 5 but costs a fraction of the price. Available across Claude apps, Claude Code, and the API, Opus 5 is billed as a thoughtful and proactive system that keeps Anthropic competitive in the top tier of large language models.
Independent benchmarks put Opus 5 at the front of several categories. On agentic terminal coding, knowledge work, agentic search, and computer use, it outperforms both Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The ARC-AGI-3 score reached 30.2 percent, three times the next best model, and it currently sits at number one on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index leaderboard.
On mathematical reasoning, the model showed perfect performance in testing against International Math Olympiad 2026 problems, scoring 42 out of 42. The previous gold threshold was 29 points.
For teams evaluating AI safety, Opus 5 also adds alignment improvements. Anthropic notes that it matches Mythos 5 at finding software bugs but remains well behind that rival at writing exploits. This boundary matters for security teams deciding which tool to trust near production code.
Price remains central to the launch. Opus 5 keeps the same rate structure as Claude 4.8: 5 dollars and 25 dollars per million tokens for input and output. That puts powerful frontier-class intelligence within reach for teams that cannot justify Fable-level pricing.
For Australian developers and businesses following the AI race, the move signals that Anthropic is no longer content with Opus sitting one tier ahead through Sonnet. Now the company is pushing down from above, using the same model family that previously competed only at the top of the market to challenge the current benchmark leaders at half the cost.
