claude-opus-5

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's second-highest-capability model in the Claude 5 family, positioned as the primary production-grade frontier model — combining near-Mythos-5 quality with better latency and a lower price point. It is a reasoning model with a 1M+ token context window — combining near-Mythos-5 quality with better latency and a lower price point. It supports vision inputs, tool use, and streaming, and is the recommended choice for demanding production workloads where maximum quality is required but Mythos 5's cost or latency is prohibitive.

Claude Opus 5 is priced at $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens — half the price of Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 on both input and output. Prompt caching reduces repeated input to $0.50/1M. At 1,000 input + 500 output tokens per call, the cost is approximately $0.0175 per 1,000 API calls. Measured throughput is 53 tokens per second with a median latency of 50.84 seconds to first token — reflecting the extended reasoning process. For workloads that can tolerate higher latency in exchange for frontier-class quality, Opus 5 offers the best quality-per-dollar in the Claude 5 family.

Claude Opus 5 supports a 1M+ token context window, enabling full-document and large-codebase analysis in a single call. As a reasoning model, it applies extended chain-of-thought processing before producing a final answer, which drives the higher latency profile. Measured latency of ~50 seconds TTFT is consistent with deep reasoning tasks; simpler queries complete faster. Maximum output is 65,536 tokens. The combination of 1M context, reasoning capability, and vision support makes it well-suited to complex document analysis, multi-step research synthesis, and agentic workflows that require sustained coherent reasoning across many tool calls.

Claude Opus 5 is best suited to high-stakes production workloads requiring frontier reasoning: advanced software engineering, complex research synthesis, multi-step agentic pipelines, nuanced document analysis, and tasks where Claude Sonnet 5 produces measurably insufficient results. Its reasoning architecture delivers strong performance on coding benchmarks, knowledge-intensive queries, and long-context reasoning. For latency-sensitive applications, Claude Sonnet 5 delivers strong quality with faster response times. Opus 5 is the right choice when quality is the primary constraint and latency of 30–60 seconds is acceptable.

Claude Opus 5 competes directly with frontier-tier reasoning models from OpenAI and other providers at a similar price point. Compared to Claude Mythos 5, it delivers near-identical benchmark performance at half the price — making it the better default choice for most frontier-tier workloads. For teams already on Anthropic's API, Opus 5 is the recommended upgrade path from prior Opus-tier models, delivering meaningfully higher quality with a larger context window.