The new model sets state-of-the-art scores on coding and knowledge-work benchmarks while matching Opus 4.8's pricing and adding stronger alignment and safety controls.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, positioning it as a high-capability everyday model that approaches the intelligence of the company’s top-tier Claude Fable 5 at half the price [1].
The practical upshot for developers: Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — identical to its predecessor, Opus 4.8 — while delivering substantially better performance across coding, knowledge work, and scientific research tasks, according to Anthropic [1].
Benchmark Performance
On Frontier-Bench v0.1, a software engineering evaluation, Opus 5 surpasses all other models tested and more than doubles Opus 4.8’s score at a lower cost per task [1]. On CursorBench 3.2 at maximum effort, it comes within 0.5% of Fable 5’s peak score but at half the cost per task [1].
Anthropic also reports gains in scientific domains. Opus 5 outperforms Opus 4.8 on every life sciences evaluation the company runs, with the largest jumps in organic chemistry — scoring 10.2 percentage points higher on inferring molecular structures from spectroscopy data — and in protein-related tasks, where it scores 7.7 percentage points higher on predicting how sequence variations affect protein function [1].
One area where Opus 5 does not lead: cybersecurity. The model remains behind Anthropic’s Mythos 5 on offensive security tasks, particularly on exploit development [1].
Effort Settings and Speed
Opus 5 introduces a configurable effort setting that lets customers trade off between maximum intelligence and faster, cheaper results by conserving tokens [1]. A Fast mode runs at roughly 2.5 times the default speed and is priced at twice the base rate on the Claude Platform; it is also available through usage credits in Claude Code [1].
Opus 5 is the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model available on Claude Pro [1].
Alignment and Safety
Anthropic says its automated behavioral audit found Opus 5 to be “our most aligned model to date,” with lower rates of deceptive behavior and greater resistance to misuse attempts than Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, or Fable 5 [1].
On dual-use risks, the company says Opus 5 does not advance the frontier in biology or offensive cybersecurity, based on evaluations conducted with private-sector and government partners [1]. Although Opus 5 can find vulnerabilities at a rate similar to Mythos 5, it remains substantially behind on exploit development — turning vulnerabilities into active threats [1].
Cyber classifiers on Opus 5 are designed to be around 85% less restrictive than those on Fable 5, allowing source-code vulnerability scanning while blocking binary-based scanning, penetration testing, and exploit generation [1]. Flagged requests in Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork fall back to Opus 4.8 by default [1]. Enterprises and researchers already enrolled in Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program (CVP) get immediate access to a version of Opus 5 with fewer restrictions [1].
On the biology side, biology-related requests that are blocked on Fable 5 will now route to Opus 5 rather than Opus 4.8, making Opus 5 the most capable generally available model for scientific research under Anthropic’s current safeguard framework [1].
Availability
Claude Opus 5 is available today across all Anthropic platforms via the model identifier claude-opus-5 on the Claude API [1]. Anthropic notes that, consistent with prior Opus models, Opus 5 does not have data retention requirements for general access [1].
Two additional beta updates are shipping alongside Opus 5, though Anthropic did not detail them fully in the announcement [1].
Sources
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