In a rare Friday release, Opus 5 took the headlines today. Athrough most of its official benchmarks have it technically beating Fable, the official messaging still says it “comes close”. This mostly reflects the difficulty of Evals - today’s AIE track drop - not reflecting “big model smell” that Anthropic obviously knows Fable retains but can’t measure.Fortunately, independent evaluations of Opus confirm the outperformance:Artificial Analysis@ArtificialAnlysClaude Opus 5 is the new leader on our agentic knowledge work benchmark, AA-Briefcase, outperforming Claude Fable 5 by nearly 150 Elo while reducing Cost per Task by 20%