Anthropic just dropped Claude Opus 5 , the model the community had been tracking under the codename "Honeycomb" , and the headline numbers are striking. It delivers intelligence close to the Mythos-class Claude Fable 5 at half the price, sets new state-of-the-art marks on coding and knowledge-work benchmarks, and triples the next best model's score on ARC-AGI-3. It also ships today, priced identically to its predecessor Opus 4.8.
Where it fits in a crowded lineup
To understand why Opus 5 matters, you need to know where Anthropic's model stack currently sits. Anthropic's lineup runs from the budget Haiku tier through mid-tier Sonnet, up to Opus, with the premium-priced Fable 5 sitting at the top of the range. Mythos-class models are a tier of Claude models that sit above the Opus class in capability. Claude Fable 5 ($10/$50 per million tokens) is Anthropic's restored frontier tier, while Claude Mythos 5 is a trusted-access model with the same capability class but broader safeguards lifted for specific use cases.
Opus 5 slots in below Fable 5 but, according to Anthropic, approaches it in raw intelligence , while costing the same $5/$25 per million input/output tokens as Opus 4.8. That's a meaningful value proposition in a market where Claude Fable 5 ($10/$50) already undercuts GPT-5.5 Pro ($30/$180) by 3–3.6x at the frontier tier.
The benchmark story
Anthropic claims Opus 5 is state-of-the-art on several coding and knowledge-work evaluations. The most eye-catching number is on ARC-AGI-3 , a benchmark worth understanding in depth.
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