Anthropic PBC is rolling out a new artificial intelligence model that is meant to handle workplace tasks adeptly and affordably, a key selling point as some customers grow more cost conscious and competition increases in China.The company on Friday unveiled Claude Opus 5, a model it says approaches the capabilities of its most advanced widely available offering, Fable 5, in many categories but at half the price. Anthropic said it expects Opus 5 to serve as the default option for many day-to-day office needs.A number of AI developers, including OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and SpaceXAI, are competing to offer more cost-efficient AI models as businesses increasingly scrutinize their AI spending. Some customers have recently imposed tighter limits on employee AI usage after being hit by sticker shock.“We’re very much responding to this feedback from enterprises about, ‘How do I generate more value?’” said Dianne Penn, head of research product management at Anthropic.The emphasis on affordability may grow as China shows signs of gaining ground on the US in the AI race. Last week, Chinese AI lab Moonshot released Kimi K3, a more advanced open-weight model that it said outperforms all rivals except for Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on overall capability. Other Chinese firms, including DeepSeek, have pushed to undercut US rivals on pricing.Anthropic said Opus 5 is a general-purpose model with improved abilities to check its own work, field scientific research and streamline coding, a lucrative market for AI. The model is also nearly as capable as Anthropic’s more advanced Mythos 5 offering in finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but “remains substantially behind” in exploiting them, Anthropic said. “As with its predecessor, Opus 4.8, we’ve intentionally avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks,” the company said in a blog post. “The model has nevertheless improved substantially on these tasks as a result of becoming more generally capable.”Anthropic previously delayed the release of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 under pressure from the US government. It later redeployed Fable 5 with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks.The company said Opus 5’s classifiers are “proportionally less restrictive” than with Fable 5, meaning those safeguards will intervene significantly less often and block a more limited range of tasks. Anthropic said it conducted “rigorous evaluations” of the model “alongside private sector and government partners.”Rival OpenAI also delayed the introduction of its most recent model, GPT-5.6, while the government reviewed it. Earlier this week, OpenAI said its most advanced models inadvertently breached AI startup Hugging Face’s internal systems, an incident that the ChatGPT maker described as “unprecedented.” The hack was carried out in a matter of hours.Penn said OpenAI’s breach is a reminder of AI’s rapidly improving capabilities and the need for companies to be “continuously updating our evaluations and our security systems.”More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comPublished on July 25, 2026