Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 AI model at half the cost of flagship system

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 AI model at half the cost of flagship system

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on Friday, introducing an artificial intelligence model that approaches the performance of its most powerful system while cutting costs in half for business customers.

The San Francisco-based startup, which filed confidentially for an initial public offering on June 1, 2026, at a $965 billion valuation, positions the new model as a direct answer to enterprise concerns about the rising expense of running advanced AI systems. The company competes directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in the rapidly evolving AI market.

Competitive pricing and performance

Claude Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, exactly half the price of Fable 5, Anthropic's most expensive publicly available offering priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Customers pay based on the amount of computational work performed, measured in units called tokens.

The company said the new model performs close to Fable 5 across many tasks despite the lower cost, topping industry benchmarks for coding and knowledge work while consuming fewer computing resources than earlier versions.

Opus 5 marks the fourth model Anthropic has released in less than two months, following Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5 in June 2026. The rapid release pace comes as the AI industry increasingly focuses on cost efficiency, with OpenAI releasing GPT-5.6 on July 9, 2026, also emphasizing economical token usage in its marketing.

Growing market presence

Anthropic's aggressive product strategy comes amid explosive revenue growth. The company's annualized revenue climbed from approximately $1 billion at the end of 2024 to a projected $9 billion by the end of 2025, with industry analysts at Sacra estimating $47 billion in annualized revenue by May 2026.

Claude held approximately 40 percent of the enterprise large language model market by usage as of late 2025, with over 300,000 business customers accounting for approximately 80 percent of revenue. The company raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round in February 2026 at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by GIC and Coatue.

Cost considerations have become increasingly critical as both Anthropic and its archrival OpenAI prepare for their market debuts. Wall Street is scrutinizing their business performance more closely than ever ahead of their stock market listings.

Safety restrictions and capabilities

On cybersecurity, Anthropic said it deliberately avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks. The model remains behind Mythos 5 on both offensive cyber work and biological research capabilities that could be misused. Mythos 5, Anthropic's most capable and most tightly restricted system, is available only to select partners.

The company said Opus 5 finds software flaws about as well as Mythos 5 but lags far behind in turning those flaws into working attacks that could be weaponized. Citing the reduced risk, Anthropic said its automated safety filters will intervene roughly 85 percent less often on Opus 5 than on Fable 5, the Mythos-class model it released last month.

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were briefly pulled from public access in June after the US Commerce Department imposed export controls, which were lifted at the end of that month.

The strength of Mythos models at finding weaknesses in computer systems and turning those weaknesses into working attacks has caused controversy and pushed the company to build tight guardrails around them. Founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, who previously served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI where he led development of GPT-2 and GPT-3, Anthropic has emphasized AI safety alongside commercial expansion.

The company's Claude Code agentic coding product, launched in May 2025, reached $2.5 billion in annualized revenue by February 2026, with enterprise use representing over half of revenue, demonstrating strong demand for Anthropic's coding-focused AI applications.