Claude Opus 5
Anthropic's Opus model from Jul 2026 for coding and agents, at $5/$25 per million tokens, now a legacy model.
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's Opus model released Jul 24, 2026, which Anthropic says comes close to Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price. On the Claude API it costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, the same as Opus 4.8, and the pricing page now lists it among legacy models.
About Claude Opus 5
Anthropic's launch post calls Opus 5 the new state of the art on coding and knowledge-work evaluations such as Frontier-Bench and GDPval-AA, though it remains behind Mythos 5 on cybersecurity tasks. It reports Opus 5 more than doubling Opus 4.8's Frontier-Bench v0.1 performance at a lower cost per task, coming within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak CursorBench 3.2 score at half the cost per task, and scoring three times as high as the next-best model on ARC-AGI 3.
Anthropic says Opus 5 is much stronger at verifying its work and iterating until it succeeds, and that it beats Opus 4.8 on every one of its life sciences evaluations, with the most notable gains on an internal organic chemistry benchmark (10.2 percentage points) and on protein tasks (7.7 points). An effort setting trades intelligence against token use, and Fast mode runs about 2.5 times the default speed at twice the base price on the Claude Platform.
Anthropic's automated behavioral audit found Opus 5 its most aligned model to date, with a score of 2.3 on overall misaligned behavior, the lowest of its recent models. Its cyber classifiers allow finding vulnerabilities in source code but block binary-based vulnerability scanning, penetration testing and exploit generation, and Anthropic expects them to intervene about 85% less often than on Fable 5. Members of the Cyber Verification Program get a version with fewer security restrictions.
At launch, Opus 5 became the default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro, and developers call it as claude-opus-5 on the Claude API. Flagged requests fall back to Opus 4.8 by default in Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and API users can turn on automatic fallbacks. The pricing page now lists it under legacy models, with cache reads at $0.50 and cache writes at $6.25 per million tokens.
Sources: anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5, claude.com/pricing and platform.claude.com/docs/en/home, read 2026-10-26
Claude Opus 5 pros and cons
Pros
- Anthropic puts it close to Fable 5's intelligence at half the per-token price: $5 and $25 per million input and output tokens against $10 and $50.
- Like prior Opus models, Opus 5 has no data retention requirements for general access.
- Mid-conversation tool changes, released in beta alongside it, let developers change Claude's tools without invalidating the prompt cache.
- The pricing page offers 50% off with batch processing.
Cons
- The pricing page now files it under legacy models, and Opus 5.5, the newer Opus, costs less at $4 input and $20 output per million tokens.
- It remains behind Mythos 5 on cybersecurity tasks and in biology research.
- Anthropic notes the model still has important limitations on long-running, autonomous research tasks.
- Several launch results come from Anthropic's internal runs and benchmarks, such as its Frontier-Bench v0.1 run.
Tagged
- Supports Claude
- Web-based
Claude Opus 5 alternatives
The closest alternatives to Claude Opus 5.
- 01→Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic's June 2026 Sonnet model for agentic work, priced at $2/$10 per million tokens, now a legacy model.
- 02→Kimi K3
Moonshot AI's 2.8T-parameter model with native vision and a 1M-token context for long-horizon coding.
- 03→DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
Official release of DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with stronger agentic skills and open weights under the MIT License.
Related reading
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</a>Frequently asked questions
- What is Claude Opus 5?
- Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's Opus model from Jul 2026 for coding and agents, at $5/$25 per million tokens, now a legacy model.
- Is Claude Opus 5 free?
- Claude Opus 5 is a paid product. Pricing details are on the official site.
- What are the alternatives to Claude Opus 5?
- The closest alternatives to Claude Opus 5 are Claude Sonnet 5, Kimi K3, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731.
- What are the downsides of Claude Opus 5?
- The pricing page now files it under legacy models, and Opus 5.5, the newer Opus, costs less at $4 input and $20 output per million tokens. It remains behind Mythos 5 on cybersecurity tasks and in biology research. Anthropic notes the model still has important limitations on long-running, autonomous research tasks. Several launch results come from Anthropic's internal runs and benchmarks, such as its Frontier-Bench v0.1 run.
- When was Claude Opus 5 released?
- Anthropic published the launch post on Jul 24, 2026 and made Opus 5 available that day on all platforms, as the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro.
- How much does Claude Opus 5 cost?
- On the Claude API, $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, the same as Opus 4.8. The pricing page lists cache reads at $0.50 and cache writes at $6.25 per million tokens, Fast mode costs twice the base price, and batch processing saves 50%.
- How does Claude Opus 5 compare with Sonnet 5?
- On the pricing page, Sonnet 5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, against $5 and $25 for Opus 5, and both are now listed as legacy models. Anthropic's audit found Opus 5 adheres to Claude's Constitution better than Sonnet 5.
- Is Claude Opus 5 free?
- Not on the free Claude plan: the pricing page's plan table lists Opus as unavailable on Free and available on Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x. On the API it is priced per token, at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
- How do I use Claude Opus 5 in the API or Claude Code?
- Developers call the model as claude-opus-5 on the Claude API, where automatic fallbacks can route flagged requests to another model. In Claude Code, Fast mode is paid through usage credits, and flagged requests fall back to Opus 4.8 by default.