Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5 — near-Fable smarts at half the token price

The model race just got a daily-driver. Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on July 24 — pitched as coming close to Claude Fable 5 intelligence at half the price, aimed at coding, agents, and enterprise workflows you actually run every day instead of once-a-quarter moonshots.

Price, access, and the Fine Print that matters

API pricing stays Opus-class: $5 per million input tokens, $25 per million output. Model id: claude-opus-5. Fast mode (research preview) runs ~2.5× speed at 2× price. Unlike Fable/Mythos, Opus 5 is not under the 30-day retention policy that spooked privacy teams — Anthropic is waving that flag hard.

Fable remains the “ambitious / long-horizon” shelf. Opus 5 is the keyboard you leave open. In a week when OpenAI’s cyber eval drama still owns Slack channels, Anthropic’s bet is quieter: cheaper intelligence you can actually afford to leave running.