Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5 at half Fable 5's price

Anthropic's release of Claude Opus 5 represents a strategic repositioning in the reasoning model market. The model achieves near-Fable 5 performance on benchmarks such as CursorBench 3.2—where Opus 5 at maximum effort scoring reaches within 0.5 points of Fable 5's peak—while cutting API costs in half. This pricing move directly challenges OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, which costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens.

The safety posture shift signals a notable change in Anthropic's design philosophy. While Opus 4.8 maintained strict guardrails, Opus 5 relaxes constraints from its predecessor, though Anthropic introduced an automatic fallback mechanism to mitigate risk. The fallback routes flagged requests (including those related to cybersecurity tasks) to a safer model, allowing users to deploy the more capable model in sensitive contexts while retaining a safety net. For cybersecurity teams and enterprises, this may unlock use cases previously blocked by stricter safety rules—though the trade-off is that some requests will be automatically diverted rather than answered.

Anthropically notes that on the CursorBench benchmark, where safety guardrails present obstacles to maximum performance, Fable 5 scores approximately 85 points; Opus 5, despite new safeguards, avoids the blocking behavior of Opus 4.8 and reaches comparable ability on the underlying task. The Cyber Verification Program referenced in the announcement suggests Anthropic is investing in structured validation for high-stakes domains.