Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Opus 5, is now available to the public.
Opus 5 comes close to or even exceeds the performance of its predecessor, Fable 5, in most areas, for roughly half as much per token, according to the AI giant’s benchmarking figures.
The new model outperforms Fable 5 on tasks like knowledge work, novel problem solving, and agentic search. However, it falls somewhat short of Fable 5 in task categories such as answering legal questions and performing multidisciplinary reasoning without additional tools. It’s also “substantially behind” the more powerful Mythos 5 at exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
(Credit: Anthropic)
During Anthropic’s pre-deployment testing, the company concluded that Opus 5 showed lower rates of “misaligned behavior” than its predecessors. The behavior suite found the newest model exhibited lower rates of deceptive behavior than previous models, and it proved harder to trick into misuse. Anthropic also showed that it was safer in terms of avoiding “reckless actions” that could create hard-to-reverse side effects.
(Credit: Anthropic)
Opus 5 comes after a turbulent period for users of Anthropic’s models. Last month, Anthropic blocked access to Fable 5 for users worldwide after the US government expressed concerns about how its offensive cybersecurity capabilities could be used by foreign countries. Access was restored several weeks later with restrictions.
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Anthropic is also beta-testing several new features alongside the Opus 5 launch, including what it calls automatic fallbacks. This means users can now reroute requests flagged by Claude’s safety classifiers on Opus 5 or Fable 5 to another model, rather than being blocked outright.
Claude continues to gain ground in the consumer AI market. According to Sensor Tower’s State of AI 2026 report, Claude’s global market share was at 10.3% in May 2026, up sharply from earlier in the year, while its US share has climbed toward 14%. Over the same period, ChatGPT’s global market share fell below 50% for the first time, dropping to 46.4%, as Gemini made gains, hitting 27.7%.
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