Claude Opus 5 nears Fable 5 intelligence at half the price

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, positioning it as a daily-driver model that approaches Claude Fable 5 quality at half the per-token price ($5/$25 per million input/output tokens). On key benchmarks like CursorBench 3.2, it scores within 0.5% of Fable 5 at max effort, triples the next-best model on ARC-AGI 3, and leads on OSWorld 2.0 computer use at roughly one-third the cost of Fable 5. Its standout capability is agentic self-verification — it builds its own tooling, finds root causes rather than symptoms, and validates outputs without external references. Cyber classifiers are 85% less restrictive than Fable 5's, with flagged requests falling back to Opus 4.8. New API features include mid-conversation tool changes without cache invalidation and automatic safety fallbacks. The post also promotes Appwrite's Claude Code plugin for building agentic backends.