Claude Opus 5 Launches with Near-Fable Performance at Half Price, Intensifying Frontier Model Competition

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5, claiming near-Fable 5 intelligence at half the price. Early user reports show Opus 5 outperforming Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on large codebase bug finding, and autonomously writing CV code to read pixels from a drawing. Opus 5 is now available on Vercel AI Gateway. This is a major competitive move against OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, further driving down costs for frontier intelligence. The model is also noted for strong performance on ARC-AGI-3, tripling the next best. This launch reinforces the trend of multi-model orchestration and cost-performance optimization in applied AI. New: Opus 5 one-shotted a full game with no external assets, demonstrating creative coding capability.