Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities

Weeks after Anthropic’s latest toe-to-toe with the US government, and days after an OpenAI security incident that dominated tech industry discussions, Anthropic on Thursday released its newest model, Claude Opus 5.

The company said in a release that Opus 5 “comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains” and is much better at complex coding tasks. (Fable 5 is the public-facing Mythos-class model that drew the government’s ire, was taken offline for a few weeks along with Mythos 5, and then brought back with even stronger cyber safeguards than before.)

The Fable 5 concerns — and the ensuing weeks of negotiations between Anthropic and the government — kicked off a new era of AI regulation for the Trump administration. Soon after, when OpenAI released GPT-5.6, it underwent a roughly two-week trial period of sorts, rolling out in limited preview solely to government-approved entities.

When asked whether Anthropic ran Opus 5 by the Trump administration before this public rollout, Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghiglieri told The Verge, “We continue to work with our government partners to conduct their own independent testing of our models. This includes Opus 5.”

Anthropic is marketing Opus 5 especially to its enterprise customers, saying it’s best for knowledge work and biology and that it’s the ideal everyday model, with Fable 5 still being best for the most ambitious types of work and long-horizon AI agent projects. But the company was careful to say in a release that it has stronger cybersecurity safeguards than its predecessor, Opus 4.8, and that it’s “the most aligned Opus model and is the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse.”

With the new model’s release, the company also seems to subtly address recent controversies over allegedly hidden usage caps — which have led to at least one lawsuit — and the AI money squeeze, or concerns that AI labs’ costs are being passed onto their customers in new ways. Per million tokens, pricing for Opus 5 is the same as its predecessor ($5 input / $25 output), and Anthropic made the point that it’s “half the price” of Fable 5. It’s also slightly cheaper than OpenAI’s GPT-5.6.

Customers can also choose “Fast mode” for Opus 5 (a feature that’s being launched today in research preview), to get higher speeds for double the price. There’s also an option to opt in to automatic fallbacks to a lower-tier model when safeguards mandate that Opus 5 declines a user’s request.