Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its top model, and that lands squarely on whoever pays the bill
Anthropic's new model arrived on 24 July priced at 5 dollars per million input tokens and 25 per million output, roughly half of Claude Fable 5. It becomes the default model on the Max plan.
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on 24 July, and the pitch isn’t raw intelligence — it’s the invoice. The model costs 5 dollars per million input tokens and 25 per million output, roughly half what you pay for Claude Fable 5, the flagship released in June.
What’s different from the previous model?
Opus 5 replaces May’s Opus 4.8, and the company describes it as more efficient and better at checking its own work — able to change course mid-task rather than confidently handing over a wrong answer. That’s a less flashy claim than a benchmark jump, and it’s exactly the one that matters to people using these tools eight hours a day for coding and knowledge work.
In practice it lands as the default model on the Claude Max plan and the most capable option available on Claude Pro.
Why is the price the story?
Because the market stopped being a race for the smartest model and turned into an argument about cost per task. Anyone building products on top of these models doesn’t pick the top of the leaderboard, they pick what they can afford to run a thousand times a day without wrecking the margin. Halving the price while staying near the top is a commercial move before it’s a technical one.
There’s context behind it too. This is the same week Nvidia is in talks to guarantee 250 billion dollars for an OpenAI data centre in Ohio — infrastructure numbers keep climbing while per-token prices fall. Somebody, somewhere, is betting volume covers the margin.
For Portuguese companies there’s also a date on the calendar: on 2 August the EU AI regulation’s transparency obligations kick in, with concrete rules about what has to be disclosed to users. The official text and guidance sit on the European Commission’s digital strategy portal.
New model, falling price, legal deadline incoming. August is going to be interesting for anyone running this in production.
By Oliver Grant
Image: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
