Question 1

Is Claude Opus 5 more expensive than Opus 4.8?

Accepted Answer

No. Both cost $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens [1][5]. Fast mode, roughly 2.5x default speed at twice the base price, carries over unchanged [2].

Question 2

Is Opus 5 better than Fable 5?

Accepted Answer

On many tasks it comes close at half the price. It scores within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak on CursorBench 3.2. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 stay ahead on offensive cybersecurity and autonomous biology research [1].

Question 3

What happens to Opus 4.8?

Accepted Answer

It remains available, and it still runs behind the scenes as the default fallback for requests flagged by Opus 5's safety classifiers [2].

Question 4

Should I use Sonnet 5 or Opus 5?

Accepted Answer

Rule of thumb: if Opus 4.8 ever felt slow, shallow, or unreliable on your work, go Opus 5. If 4.8 always had headroom to spare, test Sonnet 5 and pocket the difference [3].

Question 5

Is Claude Opus 5 good for coding?

Accepted Answer

Yes. It holds the top score on Frontier-Bench v0.1, more than double Opus 4.8's result at a lower cost per task, and nearly matches the far pricier Fable 5 on CursorBench 3.2 [1].

By Anthropic's published benchmarks, it is the strongest coding model at this price.

Claude

Claude Opus 5 vs Opus 4.8: What You Actually Get for the Same Price

Claude Opus 5 vs Opus 4.8: What You Actually Get for the Same Price