Claude Opus 5 arrives with near Fable performance at half the price

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Opus 5 targets coding, knowledge work, and agent workflows.

Anthropic says it uses fewer tokens for similar quality.

Developers get faster output and smarter tool controls.

To the surprise of no one, Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5. After releasing the controversial Mythos 5 and Fable 5 last month and Sonnet 5 on July 1, it was inevitable that Opus would be bumped from 4.8 to 5. That's happening today.

I've been impressed with Opus 4.8. I've been using it for a number of large coding projects, and it's handled them quite well. But based on limited user reports, it's likely that Claude Code will get another big boost.

Also: I use Anthropic's Claude AI tools for very different jobs: How to pick between models, Code, and Cowork

I'm not the only one impressed with Opus, based on the accolades included in Anthropic's announcement.

Cristian Rivera, software engineer at Stripe, says, "Opus 5 is a clear generational step up from Opus 4.8. Over one weekend, I gave it a chief-of-staff role over my dev environments: it built its own monitor, drove each box, and pulled me in only for the judgment calls."

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