Anthropic says Opus 5 nearly matches top model at half price

Anthropic has announced that its new Opus 5 model can nearly match the performance of its top-performing model while costing half as much. The company claims Opus 5 achieves 98% of the benchmark scores of its flagship model, but at a 50% lower price point, making advanced AI capabilities more accessible to businesses and developers. This development matters because it could significantly reduce the cost of deploying high-performance AI, potentially accelerating adoption across industries that have been priced out of using cutting-edge models. According to Anthropic, Opus 5 is available now via API, with pricing set at $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens, compared to the flagship model's $30 and $120 respectively. The company has not disclosed the exact name of its top-performing model, but it is widely understood to be Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Anthropic plans to continue refining Opus 5 based on user feedback and may release further performance improvements in future updates. The announcement comes amid intensifying competition in the AI market, with companies like OpenAI and Google also releasing cost-efficient models.