Business25 July 2026

Anthropic launches Opus 5 AI model at lower cost

Anthropic rolls out Opus 5 AI model in efficiency upgrade

Anthropic on Friday launched Opus 5, its latest AI model that the startup says nears the capabilities of ​its more powerful cousin Fable 5 at half the price.

The ​San Francisco-based lab said the new Claude AI model ⁠was well suited for daily office and computer programming tasks.

In an ​interview with Reuters, Anthropic product leader Dianne Penn said the release, ​more efficient than May's Opus 4.8, reflected a rapid pace of development.

"We're building and continue to consistently deliver frontier intelligence and bring that as accessibly as ​possible with every model generation," said Penn.

In testing, Opus 5 ​was less capable of exploiting cyber vulnerabilities than Anthropic's top-shelf AI, so its ‌related ⁠safeguards are less restrictive than Fable 5's. Opus 5 was also less susceptible to being tricked into misuse than Anthropic's other current models, the startup said.

Released in June, Anthropic's Fable 5 was temporarily unavailable ​following U.S. concerns that ​its capabilities ⁠could be diverted to foreign military intelligence.

Users should pick Opus 5 for value and Fable 5 for "days-long, very ​autonomous projects," Penn said.

Asked about the Kimi K3 "open" model ​from China-based ⁠Moonshot, which the U.S. accused of freeloading off Anthropic, Penn said it "remains to be seen" how open-weight models generally perform on complicated real-world ⁠projects that ​users ask Claude to tackle.

Open-weight models ​allow users to download, run and customise the virtual brains of an AI, unlike proprietary ​models.

-Reuters
Related recommendation
Hiru TV News | Programmes