Opus 5 shifts focus to token efficiency over a capability leap

Anthropic’s Opus 5 delivers incremental performance gains for coding and related tasks while prioritizing lower token costs, charging about $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. It rivals Fable on many benchmarks and is cheaper than Opus 4.x, with broader availability than Mythos, but it doesn’t train as aggressively on cybersecurity tasks and lags Mythos in vulnerability exploitation. The takeaway is cost-driven progress rather than a dramatic leap in capability, as developers explore model routers and open-weight options to minimize compute and expense.