Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 across all platforms, pricing the new model at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — matching Opus 4.8 rates.

The model becomes the default for Claude Max subscribers and the strongest option for Claude Pro users. Developers can access claude-opus-5 through the Claude API, with fast mode running at 2.5 times default speed for double the base price.

Performance gains across key benchmarks

Opus 5 leads Frontier-Bench v0.1 and more than doubles Opus 4.8's performance at lower cost per task, according to Anthropic. On CursorBench 3.2 at maximum effort, it finished within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak score for half the cost.

The model scored three times higher than the next-best competitor on ARC-AGI 3 and beat every other model at equivalent cost on OSWorld 2.0. It surpassed Opus 4.8 across life-sciences evaluations and delivered stronger visual output.

Early-access customers reported improvements in debugging, analytics, financial research, genomics, legal work, code review, and extended coding tasks. The model emphasizes verification — in one case building a computer-vision pipeline to reconstruct a machine-part drawing as a 3D FreeCAD model after multiple attempts.

Tighter cyber controls block risky tasks

Anthropic implemented new classifiers that permit vulnerability discovery in source code but block binary scanning, penetration testing, and exploit generation. Flagged requests automatically fall back to Opus 4.8 in Claude AI, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.

The company said Opus 5 remains behind Mythos 5 in biology research and offensive cybersecurity capabilities, describing it as their most aligned model yet that "does not move the frontier in risky dual-use capabilities."

Two beta API updates allow developers to change tools mid-conversation without invalidating prompt cache and route safety-flagged requests to alternative models. The model launches with an effort setting that lets customers balance token usage and cost against speed and capability.