Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 today, a new AI model it said is geared toward everyday business needs.
Amid growing concerns from enterprise customers about expensive AI bills, Opus 5 comes with a feature enabling users to toggle how much effort—low, medium, or high—the model expends completing a task or answering a prompt. The company said this will enables users to balance between cost and capability.Anthropic also said the model was easier to use than its predecessors, requiring less back and forth. It verifies its own work and recovers from errors without intervention. This is the fourth model Anthropic has released in less than two months, following Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5 in June.
Fable 5 is the controversial, powerful model the U.S. government temporarily imposed export controls on after Amazon researchers reported they could bypass its safeguards. In response, Anthropic took the model off the market on June 12, and then re-released it on June 30 after fortifying its security.
Business customers and developers also criticized Fable 5’s burn rate, or the high number of tokens the model tended to use when completing tasks. This resulted in users blowing through their allotted token budgets or running up large bills. (Tokens are the units of information an AI model processes, equivalent in English text to about a word and a half. Tokens are also the unit AI companies tend to use to bill for model usage.)Opus 5 “comes close” to the capabilities of Fable 5, but at half the price, according to Anthropic. However, the company still recommends Fable 5 for more advanced projects, including those which the model may handle autonomously for days on end.
