Link CopyTwitterLinkedinWhatsappClaude Opus 5 Costs Half Of Anthropic's Flagship And Scores HigherAnthropic released Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — half the price of its own Claude Fable 5 flagship, and unchanged from Claude Opus 4.8. Artificial Analysis scores Opus 5 at 61 on its Intelligence Index, one point above Fable 5 and two above OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. The model carries a 1-million-token context window, a five-level effort ladder that defaults to adaptive, and a paid Fast mode at double the price for roughly 2.5 times the throughput. The release lands seven weeks into Anthropic's confidential IPO filing and three days before Moonshot's Kimi K3 is due to publish open weights scoring 57.1.Anthropic undercut itself on Friday. Claude Opus 5, which shipped on 24 July, carries the same $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens that Opus 4.8 carried in May. Artificial Analysis has already scored it at 61 on its Intelligence Index — one point above Claude Fable 5, the model Anthropic charges exactly twice as much to run. That is a capability release, and a strong one. It is also a company seven weeks into a confidential IPO filing choosing token price as its competitive weapon, in the same month that the chief executive of India's largest software services firm told reporters token cost had become his customers' binding constraint.The industry spent 2024 and 2025 competing on which model was cleverest. Somewhere in the past two quarters the race changed shape. Every serious lab now ships frontier-adjacent intelligence; the separation happens on what it costs to finish a job. Opus 5 is the clearest statement yet of that shift, and it comes from the lab with the most to lose from getting the pricing wrong — reporting around Anthropic's May funding round put its revenue run-rate at $47 billion, against the company's own April figure of more than $30 billion and about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Every point of gross margin it gives away now is a point the public market will price in the autumn.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.