Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic on Friday unveiled Claude Opus 5, its newest flagship AI model, saying it delivers stronger performance than Claude Fable 5 while costing half as much, as businesses increasingly demand lower-cost AI tools with clearer returns on investment.
According to Anthropic, Opus 5 outperforms its predecessor on coding and knowledge-work benchmarks and is designed for everyday enterprise use, News.Az reports, citing CNBC.
The company said the model will cost $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, compared with the higher pricing of Fable 5.
While Anthropic described Opus 5 as its best-performing and most cost-effective model to date, it said the model is not state-of-the-art for high-risk, dual-use applications, including offensive cybersecurity.
The launch comes as Anthropic and rival OpenAI face increasing pressure from enterprise customers looking to control AI spending and justify investments with measurable business value.
“Enterprises, in our feedback and with our customer base, are looking for value,” Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management for research, told CNBC. “If it’s a cheaper model or a cheaper offering, but it’s not accomplishing a similar level of quality, it’s actually not useful.”
Anthropic is also competing with a growing number of lower-cost AI offerings from companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and several Chinese AI startups.
The company has faced heightened scrutiny since introducing Claude Mythos Preview in April, a model it said demonstrated advanced cybersecurity capabilities, including identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities.
In June, Anthropic released Mythos 5 alongside Fable 5, describing the latter as safe for general use and its most capable publicly available AI model at the time.
Both models were temporarily taken offline days after launch to comply with a government export control directive citing national security concerns. Anthropic restored access roughly two weeks later after negotiations with government officials.
Penn said Anthropic continues to work closely with government agencies during pre-deployment testing of new models, including Opus 5. According to the company, Mythos 5 still exceeds Opus 5 in offensive cybersecurity and biology research capabilities.