Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5, adding a new Fast mode for people who need quicker responses and more back-and-forth while working.
The update is aimed at practical, everyday tasks rather than flashy demos. Opus 5 is designed for coding, document analysis and longer jobs that require the model to keep track of earlier instructions.
That matters when the work is more complicated than answering a single question. Developers, for example, may ask a model to inspect a large codebase, fix several bugs and check that one change has not broken something elsewhere. These are the kinds of tasks where consistency can matter as much as raw speed.
Opus 5 is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. That is roughly half the price of Fable 5, which sits higher in the company’s model lineup. The comparison does not mean Opus 5 has been discounted by 50 percent; it means its standard API rates are about half those of Fable 5.
The new Fast mode gives users another option. It can return answers more quickly, which may be useful when debugging code, reviewing changes or asking a series of short follow-up questions. The trade-off is cost: Fast mode is priced above the standard setting.
For people using these models every day, the difference is easy to understand. Standard mode keeps expenses under control, while Fast mode is there when waiting becomes the bigger problem.
Opus 5 is not expected to replace the most expensive model in every situation. Fable 5 may still be better suited to the hardest, longest-running tasks. But many users may find that Opus 5 is strong enough for regular coding, research and office work without paying flagship prices each time.
The release is less about claiming one model can do everything and more about giving users a choice between speed, capability and cost. For teams that rely on Claude throughout the working day, that may be the most useful part of the update.
