Anthropic Releases Opus 5: New Default for Programming Agents, Half the Price of Fable 5 with Comparable Capabilities

On July 24, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, making it the default model for Claude Code. Its pricing is the same as that of Opus 4.8, at $5/$25 per million tokens. The official stated that its capabilities are close to those of Fable 5, but the cost is only about half. The model enables adaptive thinking by default, and the effort parameter can be adjusted across five levels. It topped evaluations including Frontier-Bench v0.1 and GDPval-AA, and achieved 96.0% on SWE-bench Verified. On the same day, GitHub Copilot integrated Opus 5, covering multiple terminals such as VS Code and CLI. This article sorts out the evaluation data, key points of API migration, and suggestions for selecting between Opus 5 and Fable 5.