Claude Opus 5 Ships: Cheap as Sonnet, Anthropic Claims, Smart as Fable
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, described as a thoughtful and proactive model approaching Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price.
What it is
Anthropic's newly launched flagship model, Claude Opus 5, positioned between its prior Opus line and the higher-end Fable 5.
What it does
Anthropic describes it as a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at roughly half the price, and it's already the default Opus model in Claude Code 2.1.219.
Why it matters
Compared to running the pricier Fable 5 for every task, a cheaper near-frontier Opus tier changes the cost calculus for teams running Claude Code at scale in CI or agentic pipelines.
How to use it
Select claude-opus-5 via the API or let Claude Code's default pick it up automatically, and compare its output against Fable 5 on your own workload before committing to a cheaper default.
Claude Code 2.1.219 Makes Claude Opus 5 the Default Opus Model
Claude Code 2.1.219 makes Claude Opus 5 the default Opus model with 1M context and fast mode at $10/$50 per Mtok, and adds a sandbox.network.strictAllowlist setting to silently deny non-allowlisted hosts.
Claude Code 2.1.218 Moves /code-review to a Background Subagent
Claude Code 2.1.218 runs /code-review as a background subagent instead of filling the main conversation, and fixes a bug where the left arrow key discarded the conversation with no undo.
Claude Code 2.1.217 Adds Emoji Autocomplete and Fixes an MCP Memory Leak
Claude Code 2.1.217 adds emoji shortcode autocomplete, warns when transcript writes fail instead of losing sessions silently, and fixes a memory leak from truncated MCP tool outputs.