At a Glance
| Vendor | Anthropic |
| Family | Claude 5 series |
| Launched | Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, succeeding Opus 4.8. Anthropic's model documentation now tells developers to start with Opus 5 for most workloads and to move up to Fable 5.1 only when Opus 5 at higher effort still falls short, which makes Opus 5 the default recommendation for serious API work. |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens with a 128,000-token synchronous output limit, and up to 300,000 output tokens through the Message Batches API with a beta header. Reliable knowledge cutoff is May 2026, the most recent of any Claude model except Fable 5.1. |
| Pricing | $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, the same list price as Opus 4.8 and half of Fable 5.1's $10 / $50. Prompt cache reads cost 10 percent of base input and the Batch API is 50 percent off. A fast mode runs about 2.5x faster at 2x the base price. |
| Access channels | Anthropic API (claude-opus-5), Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude Platform, plus Amazon Bedrock (anthropic.claude-opus-5), Google Cloud Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry, and Claude Platform on AWS. |
Notable Benchmarks
Anthropic reports state-of-the-art results on Frontier-Bench v0.1, where Opus 5 roughly doubles Opus 4.8 (about 43 percent against 21 percent in launch coverage), near-parity with Fable 5 on CursorBench 3.2 at max effort for about half the cost, a lead of roughly 3x over the next-best model on ARC-AGI-3, and 52.3 percent on Terminal-Bench 4.0 in the later Fable 5.1 comparison table. Anthropic also says Opus 5 still trails Mythos 5 on cybersecurity exploitation and autonomous biology research tasks.
Strengths
Frontier-level agentic coding and computer use at unchanged Opus pricing, a fresh May 2026 knowledge cutoff, 1M context by default, and a five-level effort control that lets teams trade cost for depth per request instead of switching models.
Limitations
Slower than Sonnet 5 and more than twice its price, so high-volume pipelines rarely need it. Several headline benchmarks are new suites (Frontier-Bench v0.1, Terminal-Bench 4.0) without much independent history yet, and Fable 5.1 has since overtaken it at the top of the lineup.
Brand-Visibility Implications
Opus 5 matters for brand visibility mostly through its knowledge cutoff and its role as the recommended default for agents built on Claude. A May 2026 reliable cutoff means coverage from the first five months of 2026 is now in parametric recall for Opus-backed products, a larger jump than most mid-cycle releases. Because Anthropic points developers at Opus 5 first, it is the model behind a growing share of third-party research and shopping agents, so brand baselines for Claude should include an Opus 5 run alongside the consumer default. See Claude Fable 5.1 brief, Claude family lineage, and Claude brand visibility.
How Presenc AI Tracks This Model
Presenc AI monitors brand visibility on Anthropic's Claude 5 series as part of continuous multi-platform AI visibility tracking. We sample Claude Opus 5 across representative prompt sets daily, compare against competitor performance on the same prompts, and flag material mention-rate changes so brand teams can respond quickly when AI representation shifts.