Anthropic has released a new Claude model, Opus 5, bringing it close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 at half the price. The new model produces the strongest work performance the company has released, with even more gains in its coding capabilities.
In a fight for AI supremacy, Anthropic joins Google and OpenAI, which earlier this month released new AI models — all of which are more efficient and better at certain tasks. While Fable 5 remains Anthropic’s most “ambitious” work, the latest model excels in enterprise with its coding capabilities and more.
Anthropic says Opus 5’s strengths lie in knowledge work, autonomy and biology. It’s capable of working more independently at completing tasks without user input and with less back-and-forth than previous models. It can also now double-check its own work and recover from errors as it goes along.
There’s been a boost in the quality of scientific research with Opus 5 over Opus 4.8. Those improvements are seen most in organic chemistry tasks, like inferring molecular structures from spectroscopy data, according to Anthropic.
You can now adjust effort levels for the model as well. There’s a “dial” that can be adjusted to indicate how hard AI thinks about a specific problem or task. There are also new safety and security guardrails in place, which Anthropic calls the “most secure model yet and the hardest to trick into doing harmful things.”
While the model is not specifically designed with cybersecurity in mind, its safeguards make it more useful for tasks such as secure coding and finding vulnerabilities.
New fast mode and more
Claude now has a research preview for an Opus 5 fast mode. Anthropic says this mode provides Full Opus 5 Intelligence with 2.5x faster output token generation at 2x standard Opus 4 pricing. The mode is also available via Claude Code with extra usage credits.
Anthropic is introducing a “fallback model” for when you prompt something that trips a strict safety filter, only to block the request. For these instances, the system will automatically switch to another model in an attempt to provide an answer to the prompt. You can choose what model to fall back on in these scenarios.
There’s also a new option for developers that will allow them to change the tools Claude can use midconversation without invalidating the prompt cache. This means each phase of an agent’s work is only exposed to the tools it needs to perform its task.
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