Anthropic on Friday announced its latest artificial intelligence model, Claude Opus 5, which it said is its best-performing and most cost-effective offering across a number of industry benchmarks.
Opus 5 outperforms the last model that Anthropic released, Claude Fable 5, on coding and knowledge work evaluations, and the company said it’s “designed to be used every day,” according to a blog post. Opus 5 is also half the price of Fable 5, and will cost users $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
Anthropic said Opus 5 is not the state-of-the-art for “risky, dual-use capabilities,” like cybersecurity.
The model launch comes as Anthropic and its chief rival, OpenAI, have been working to appease a more cost-conscious customer base, where enterprises are less inclined to experiment with pricey models without a clear picture of the return on their investment. Anthropic is also facing pressure from competitors that tout cheaper offerings, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and a number of Chinese startups.
“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 in an interview. “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 has been the subject of intense scrutiny since it released a model called Claude Mythos Preview in April, which it rolled out to a select group of users. The company said the model was extremely capable in cybersecurity, and that it excelled at discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities within software.
In June, Anthropic released an updated version of the model, Mythos 5, and it also launched another version of the model, Fable 5, that it said was safe for general use. The company said Fable 5’s capabilities exceeded those of all other models it had ever released publicly, according to a blog post.
Anthropic had to briefly disable access to Mythos 5 and Fable 5 days after they were released in order to comply with an export control directive from the government that cited “national security authorities.” The export controls were lifted after roughly two weeks of intense negotiations, and Anthropic was able to restore access to both models.
Penn said Anthropic is continuing to collaborate with government agencies as part of its pre-deployment and testing, including with Opus 5. The company said Opus 5 remains behind Mythos 5 in offensive cybersecurity and biology research.
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