Sam's News — ai — 2026-07-25¶
TL;DR¶
AI¶
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 AI model at half the cost of competitors¶
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5, claiming near-flagship performance at half the price of rival Fable 5, marking an industry shift toward cost-efficiency over raw capability.
- Priced at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens, same as Opus 4.8, half Fable 5's $10/$50
- Scored 43.3% on Frontier-Bench v0.1 vs Opus 4.8's 18.7% and Fable 5's 33.7%
- Within 0.5% of Fable 5 on CursorBench 3.2 at half the cost per task
- New "effort dial" (low/medium/high) lets users trade cost for capability
- Fast mode runs ~2.5x speed at double price ($10/$50 per million tokens)
- Trained without offensive cyber capabilities, cutting safety interventions ~85% vs Fable 5
- Now default model on Claude Max, strongest available on Claude Pro
Sources: Anthropic Research, Buttondown RSS, Thurrott.com RSS, H2S Media RSS, Briefs Finance RSS, the-decoder.com RSS