About Claude Opus 5
Claude Opus 5 is the model Anthropic itself suggests starting with: its documentation recommends it for complex agentic coding and enterprise work, reserving the Mythos-class Fable for workloads that need the highest available capability. It continues the Opus line's role as the dependable frontier tier — million-token context, large output allowance, text-and-image input.
Adaptive thinking is built in, and on the API the effort setting defaults to its highest level, so out of the box Opus leans deliberate rather than fast. Anthropic publishes a dedicated migration guide from earlier Opus generations, a signal of how much production traffic the line carries.
Opus pricing is half of Fable's on both sides of the ledger, with the usual Anthropic structure: output at several times input, cache reads at a tenth of the input rate, cache writes at a premium over it, and batch processing at half price. The default-high effort setting deserves attention in budgeting — thinking tokens bill as output, and turning effort down explicitly is the single easiest saving on workloads that don't need maximum deliberation. Against its own family, Haiku handles volume work at a fifth of the rates, and Sonnet covers the middle; Opus earns its price on long agentic sessions where capability compounds.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the Claude Opus 5 API cost?
Claude Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.5 per million (90% off).
How much does a typical chat message cost with Claude Opus 5?
A short chat message (about 500 input and 250 output tokens) costs roughly $0.0088 with Claude Opus 5. At 1,000 such requests a day, that is about $262.50 per month.
Is Claude Opus 5 cheap compared to similar models?
Claude Opus 5 has the #26 cheapest input rate of the 29 models we track. On a mixed workload (10K input / 2K output), it costs $0.100 per request, versus $0.045 for GPT-4o.
What does Claude Opus 5 cost per 1,000 tokens?
Per 1,000 tokens, Claude Opus 5 costs $0.0050 for input and $0.0250 for output, or $0.00050 for cached input. Providers quote rates per million tokens ($5/M in, $25/M out here), so divide by a thousand for the per-1K figure older pricing pages used.
How large a prompt can Claude Opus 5 take?
Claude Opus 5 accepts up to 977K tokens of input context and can generate up to 125K tokens of output per request. At its input rate, filling the entire 977K-token window costs about $5.00 per request before any output.
Related
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All Anthropic model costs: Claude Fable 5.1 · Claude Fable 5 · Claude Sonnet 5 · Claude Haiku 4.5 · Claude Opus 4.8
Last updated 2026-09-03. Prices verified against Anthropic's official pricing page; see the methodology.