Claude Opus 5 launches as the new #1 — at half the price

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5, and it went straight to the top. On launch day it ranks number one on both of Artificial Analysis's independent leaderboards — the Intelligence Index and the Agentic Index — ahead of Anthropic's own Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.

This is Anthropic's fourth model in under two months, after Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5 — a cadence that tells you as much about the market as the model does. What makes Opus 5 notable isn't just that it leads, but that it leads while costing the same $5 / $25 per million tokens as Opus 4.8 — roughly half the price of Fable 5 for near-equal performance.

What actually changed

Two things stand out for real work. First, a new effort setting (low to high, plus a max tier) lets you dial intelligence against token cost per request — pay for deep reasoning only when the task needs it. Second, the gains are largest exactly where they matter: on Frontier-Bench it more than doubles Opus 4.8's score, and on agentic and long-horizon coding tasks it's within a hair of Fable 5's peak at half the cost per task. There's also a fast mode that runs about 2.5× quicker for double the price when latency matters more than budget.

What it means for you

For anyone using Claude — or building on it — this is the kind of upgrade that quietly resets the price-to-capability line for the whole market. A model that tops the independent leaderboards at half the previous flagship's cost pressures every competitor's pricing, and makes agentic features that were borderline-affordable last month viable this month. If you picked a model even a few weeks ago, it's worth re-checking your options against ChatGPT and the rest — the frontier moved again.