Claude Opus 5 Details: Near-Frontier at Half Price with Proactive Vision Skills
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-07-25
Anthropic has released the new model Claude Opus 5, claiming to approach the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price while being thoughtful and proactive. It currently leads the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.
Priced identically to its predecessor Opus 4.8, it retains a twice-the-cost "fast mode." Opus 5 demonstrates extreme proactiveness: in a test where it was intentionally given no way to view an image, it wrote its own computer vision pipeline to extract geometry from raw pixels and reconstructed a 3D machine part.
Regarding safety, Opus 5 is better at finding vulnerabilities but has deliberately not been trained on how to exploit them, reducing cyber threats. Anthropic also published an accompanying prompting guide.
More from Models
- Microsoft’s Fara1.5-27B trends on Hugging Face as a computer-use model — microsoft · 2026-07-25
- A closer look says Opus 5’s system prompt is shifting, not shrinking — rajistics · 2026-07-25
- RL Consistently Improves Imagination Models: Photon-1 Beats Gemini — ycombinator · 2026-07-25
- After testing Opus 5 and Fable 5 across 15 projects, one user says Opus wins most work — doodlestein · 2026-07-25
- Opus 5 Lands Between gpt-5.6 and Fable, With Better Correctness — thesaraharminta · 2026-07-25
- Two frontier models shipped this week, with Kimi 3, GPT 6 and Grok 4.7 next — bindureddy · 2026-07-25