# Claude Opus 5 launches at half Opus 4.8 price with near-Fable 5 performance

> Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, and the pitch is efficiency rather than a raw capability leap. The list price stays where Opus 4.8 sat, at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output, but Anthropic says you get close to Fable 5 level performance for that money, roughly doubling capability per dollar. It also carries a 1M-token context window. The genuinely new feature is a toggle that lets you dial effort between low, medium, and high, so you can spend more compute on a hard problem and less on a routine one instead of paying flat rate for everything. The model quietly appeared first as 'Honeycomb' in Cursor on July 9 before its wider rollout on July 23 and 24, and it becomes the default on Claude Max and the strongest option on Claude Pro. The effort toggle is the part worth noting. As these models get more capable, the interesting question is less about the ceiling and more about letting users decide, per task, how much intelligence they actually want to pay for.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Fortune · Published Sunday, August 9, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, and the pitch is efficiency rather than a raw capability leap. The list price stays where Opus 4.8 sat, at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output, but Anthropic says you get close to Fable 5 level performance for that money, roughly doubling capability per dollar. It also carries a 1M-token context window. The genuinely new feature is a toggle that lets you dial effort between low, medium, and high, so you can spend more compute on a hard problem and less on a routine one instead of paying flat rate for everything. The model quietly appeared first as 'Honeycomb' in Cursor on July 9 before its wider rollout on July 23 and 24, and it becomes the default on Claude Max and the strongest option on Claude Pro. The effort toggle is the part worth noting. As these models get more capable, the interesting question is less about the ceiling and more about letting users decide, per task, how much intelligence they actually want to pay for.

## Source

[Read the full story at Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-debuts-claude-opus-5-with-feature-that-lets-users-toggle-between-cost-and-capability/)

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