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 today | Claude Code /model claude-opus-5 (/model opus selects Opus 5.5 from v2.1.280) | Claude Code /model claude-fable-5 (/model fable selects Fable 5.1 from v2.1.257) |
Deeper single-model breakdowns live on the dedicated pages: Claude Opus 5 for coding and Claude Fable 5 for coding.
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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 September 23, 2026. The pattern was consistent: Opus 5 either matched or edged Fable 5 on the benchmarks Anthropic chose to publish, at a large cost discount. Where Fable 5 still won was the very top of the hardest leaderboards and its documented 1M tokens (128k output) context window; Opus 5's window was unpublished at launch.
Cost Math: What a Feature 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 feature, 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 |
| Feature total | $5.00 | $10.00 |
About $5.00 versus $10.00 per feature, a 2x difference that compounds fast across a sprint of dozens of features. Given Anthropic's own benchmarks put the two within a fraction of each other on most tasks, defaulting everything to Fable 5 was the expensive way to feel thorough. One generation on the gap is wider: Fable 5.1 costs 2.5x Opus 5.5 per token. 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. With today's models, default your board to Opus 5.5 and escalate only the one or two genuinely brutal features to Fable 5.1. 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 feature gated behind an approved spec and running on its own git branch. Assign Opus 5.5 to the column and bump the hard card to Fable 5.1, in the same project. More on the mechanics in model routing for coding agents, and the full lineup at AI models for coding.