Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5 — top-of-leaderboard scores at half its own flagship price

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — the same price as Opus 4.8, and half what Claude Fable 5 costs. Anthropic positions it as the default choice for agentic coding and enterprise work while keeping Fable 5 as its most capable model; on Artificial Analysis’ independent Intelligence Index it currently sits first, just ahead of Fable 5. It carries a 1-million-token context window and 128k maximum output, and appeared the same day in GitHub Copilot and on Vercel’s AI Gateway.

What it means The price-per-capability floor moved again: work that needed the top-tier model last week may now run at half the cost, in the tools most teams already code in.