Claude Opus 5
Anthropic's strongest model for work that runs long, where holding context and recovering from mistakes matters more than a single clever answer.
The facts at a glance
Pricing last checked August 7, 2026. Prices change and vary by region. Check the official pricing page ↗
Assessment
What it does well
- Anthropic reports state of the art results on Frontier-Bench and GDPval-AA
- Reported within 0.5 percent of the far more expensive Claude Fable 5 on CursorBench 3.2, at half the cost
- Computer use and a one million token context suit multi step agent work
Where it falls short
- No free access route
- The effort parameter defaults to high, and Anthropic's documentation notes it needs raising to xhigh to reach the advertised results, so out of the box behaviour understates the model
- Fast Mode doubles the price for roughly 2.5 times the speed, which is a real cost decision rather than a free upgrade
Privacy and data control
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The longer read
The parameter most people miss
Anthropic’s own documentation notes that Opus 5’s effort parameter defaults to high, and that reaching the published results generally requires setting it to xhigh. If you evaluate this model on defaults and conclude it underperforms its benchmarks, that is the likely reason. It is an unusual amount of honesty from a model card, and worth acting on.
How it performs by outcome
We assess products against a job, not a leaderboard. These are the outcomes this entry is compared under.
Worth comparing against
How this profile was produced
Source review. Every fact here is drawn from the provider documentation linked below and checked on the date shown. We have not yet run this entry through a controlled test, and no scoring is implied.
Read the full review methodology →