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Anthropic Debuts Claude Opus 5: Frontier-Level AI at Half Cost

7/26/2026

50 4 Full Breakdown

Summary

Story summary

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, at $5 per million input and $25 per million output tokens.
Opus 5 provides near-frontier capability like Claude Fable 5 for roughly half the cost.
Scoring 43.3% in Frontier-Bench v0.1, Opus 5’s safety classifiers trigger 85% less often, yielding a 2.3 non-compliance score.
Running ?2.5 × faster for double price, the model includes automatic API fallback via a Fast mode.

History

Historical Context

OpenAI’s staged 2019 release of the 1.5-billion-parameter GPT-2 introduced usage-based API pricing, and Microsoft’s 2020 $1 billion investment cemented a commercial model for large-language-model services. Building on that precedent, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026 at $5 per million input tokens, pressuring rivals such as Google DeepMind and Amazon to lower fees.

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Story summary

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, at $5 per million input and $25 per million output tokens.
Opus 5 provides near-frontier capability like Claude Fable 5 for roughly half the cost.
Scoring 43.3% in Frontier-Bench v0.1, Opus 5’s safety classifiers trigger 85% less often, yielding a 2.3 non-compliance score.
Running ?2.5 × faster for double price, the model includes automatic API fallback via a Fast mode.

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