Quick answer
- Claude Opus 5 price
- $5 in / $25 out per MTok
- Claude Fable 5 price
- $10 in / $50 out per MTok
- CursorBench 3.2
- Opus 5 within 0.5% of Fable 5 (Anthropic)
- OSWorld 2.0
- Opus 5 beats Fable 5's best (Anthropic)
Head-to-Head: The Verified Specs
Both are Anthropic models, so unlike a cross-vendor match-up the pricing and benchmarks are directly comparable. Claude Opus 5 shipped July 24, 2026; Claude Fable 5 shipped June 9, 2026 and redeployed globally on July 1. Side by side:
| Claude Opus 5 | Claude Fable 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (per MTok) | $5 in / $25 out | $10 in / $50 out |
| Released | July 24, 2026 | June 9, 2026 |
| Context window | Not published by Anthropic | 1M tokens (128k output) |
| Reasoning | Adjustable effort | Adaptive thinking, always on |
| Tier | Flagship (value) | Frontier (Mythos-class, above Opus) |
| Access | Claude Code /model opus | Claude Code /model fable (v2.1.170+) |
Deeper single-model breakdowns live on the dedicated pages: Claude Opus 5 for coding and Claude Fable 5 for coding.
The Benchmarks: How Close Opus 5 Gets
The interesting numbers are the ones Anthropic framed against Fable 5 directly in the Opus 5 launch materials. Both are Anthropic's claims, not yet third-party reproduced, so treat them as provisional, but they are apples-to-apples between the two models:
| Benchmark | Opus 5 vs Fable 5 (Anthropic) | Cost angle |
|---|---|---|
| CursorBench 3.2 | Within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak | at half the cost per task |
| OSWorld 2.0 | Beats Fable 5's best result | at ~1/3 the cost per task |
| Frontier-Bench v0.1 | Surpasses all models, >2x Opus 4.8 | lower cost per task than 4.8 |
| ARC-AGI 3 | 3x the next-best model | — |
Data verified July 24, 2026. The pattern is consistent: Opus 5 either matches or edges Fable 5 on the benchmarks Anthropic chose to publish, at a large cost discount. Where Fable 5 still wins is the very top of the hardest leaderboards and its documented 1M tokens (128k output) context window, Opus 5's window is unpublished as of launch.
Your AI workspace for shipping software.
Download AIDEN free and point it at your existing Claude Code or Codex setup. No credit card, running in minutes.
Download AIDEN freeFree to start · macOS 12+ · No credit card required
Cost Math: What a Story Actually Costs
Fable 5 is priced at exactly double Opus 5: $10 vs $5 per million input tokens, $50 vs $25 per million output. On a realistic agentic story, 500k input tokens of repo context and spec, 100k output tokens of code and reasoning:
| 500k in / 100k out | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Fable 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Input cost | $2.50 | $5.00 |
| Output cost | $2.50 | $5.00 |
| Story total | $5.00 | $10.00 |
About $5.00 versus $10.00 per story, a 2x difference that compounds fast across a sprint of dozens of stories. Given Anthropic's own benchmarks put the two within a fraction of each other on most tasks, defaulting everything to Fable 5 is the expensive way to feel thorough. For the full Claude price ladder, see the best Claude model for coding.
When to Pick Which
Pick Claude Opus 5 for
Pick Claude Fable 5 for
Or Route Both on One Board
The real answer is not either/or, it is routing. Default your board to Opus 5 and escalate only the one or two stories that are genuinely brutal to Fable 5. That way you pay the frontier price only where it changes the outcome, and get value-flagship economics everywhere else.
That is what AIDEN is built for: a macOS desktop app that runs your existing Claude Code CLI on a kanban board, BYOK and local-first, every story gated behind an approved spec and running on its own git branch. Assign Opus 5 to the column and bump the hard card to Fable 5, in the same project. More on the mechanics in model routing for coding agents, and the full lineup at AI models for coding.