Claude Opus 5 Launches at Half Fable 5's Price
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on all paid plans and the API, priced identically to Opus 4.8 at $5/$25 per million tokens — half of Fable 5. It beats Fable 5 on most published benchmarks, including a jump on Frontier Bench agentic coding (43 vs. 33) and ARC-AGI-3 (30% vs. a prior best of roughly 8%), while professional-domain scores like legal and health held flat or slipped slightly.
Why It Matters
A cheaper model outperforming a lab's own flagship on nearly every metric inverts the usual pricing logic and reframes cost-per-task, not cost-per-token, as the industry's benchmark to watch.