Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's current flagship large language model, built for developers and knowledge workers who need the strongest reasoning on long, complex tasks. Released on July 24, 2026, it sits above Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5 in the Claude lineup and is aimed at agentic coding, multi-step research, and document-heavy workflows.
Core Features
- 1.0-million-token context window with up to 128K tokens of output per request, so it can hold an entire codebase or a long report in one pass.
- Native vision, function calling, and structured-output support, making it a drop-in for agents and API integrations.
- Five-level thinking effort ladder (low, medium, high, xhigh, max) that trades latency for deeper reasoning on hard problems.
- Prompt caching at $0.50 per million cached input tokens, which cuts cost sharply on repeated agent prefixes.
Use Cases / Best For
- Autonomous coding agents and AI pair programmers that reason across large repositories (SWE-bench Verified around 96.0).
- Long-document analysis, contract review, and knowledge-work tasks that need sustained attention.
- Indie game prototyping - developers have used it to generate full Three.js scenes, lighting, and shaders.
Pros & Cons
- Pro: Frontier reasoning and a 1M-token context that handles whole codebases and long reports in a single request.
- Con: At $5/$25 per million tokens it is the most expensive Claude tier, so routine calls belong on cheaper models.
Pricing
On the Anthropic API, Opus 5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens, identical to Opus 4.8. Consumers can use it through Claude Pro at $20/mo or Max from $100/mo; the API is billed per token with no monthly minimum. The Batch API runs at 50% off.
Our Take: Best for teams that need frontier-level coding and reasoning and can route routine traffic to cheaper Sonnet or Haiku models; the trade-off is price - at the Opus tier it is roughly 5x the cost of Haiku, so a routed setup matters. See more in our AI Chat tools category.
