[AINews] Claude Opus 5: Fable-level performance at Opus price (half Fable)

In a rare Friday release, Opus 5 took the headlines today. Athrough most of its official benchmarks have it technically beating Fable, the official messaging still says it “ comes close”. This mostly reflects the difficulty of Evals - today’s AIE track drop - not reflecting “big model smell” that Anthropic obviously knows Fable retains but can’t measure.

Fortunately, independent evaluations of Opus confirm the outperformance:

@AnthropicAI has released Claude Opus 5, the new leader on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, and ","username":"ArtificialAnlys","name":"Artificial Analysis","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2042402069320290304/A8C1lP07_normal.jpg","date":"2026-07-24T22:10:41.000Z","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/HOBjK6cbIAA2Yph.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/SFuDwqY6XE"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":16,"retweet_count":45,"like_count":451,"impression_count":34514,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

And the improved efficiency story, beyond just pricing, is also important… although it only just matches GPT 5.6 Sol:

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AI Twitter Recap

Top Story: Claude Opus 5 model launch

What happened

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 launch triggered a mix of benchmark scrutiny, strong anecdotal coding-agent praise, and renewed debate about frontier model evaluation.

Multiple tweets explicitly discuss Claude Opus 5 as a newly launched model and compare it to other frontier systems on coding and general capability metrics, including Epoch’s ECI assessment, a FrontierCode anomaly discussion, and early user reactions from tool-use workflows like browser automation @abacaj, @abacaj.

Epoch rep…