---
title: "Claude Opus 5 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/models/anthropic__claude-opus-5/
description: "Claude Opus 5: $5.00/M in, $25.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper."
---

# Claude Opus 5 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai

> Claude Opus 5: $5.00/M in, $25.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper.

[Leaderboard](/) / Anthropic

# Claude Opus 5

Anthropic · released 2026-07-24 · proprietary

 $10.00 per million tokens, balanced Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic

## Nothing is both better and cheaper.

Under a balanced workload, no other model in the catalogue scores higher *and* costs less. This model is on the value frontier.

The same model via **batch** is 50% cheaper ($5.00/M) — same weights, different latency.

## Our take

 editorial — not a measurement

The best price/intelligence point at the frontier right now and the model most teams should default to for hard agentic work. It tops the Artificial Analysis intelligence index at 63 while costing $5/$25 — half of Fable 5, which scores lower. The flat 1M-token context with no tiered pricing is a genuine structural advantage over OpenAI, Google and xAI, all of which roughly double their rate past a threshold; a 900k-token Opus 5 request costs the same per token as a 9k one, which nothing else at this tier can say. Caveats: ~41s TTFT at max effort, and the same ~30% tokenizer inflation as Fable 5, so compare it to older models on cost-per-task, not cost-per-token.

 - **Unverified in this take:** This note cites a time-to-first-token figure that the data layer withheld as implausible (it appears to be total reasoning time mislabelled at source). Treat it as unverified.
- **Unverified in this take:** Anthropic does publish a token-inflation figure, but it compares newer Claude models against EARLIER CLAUDE models — not against another vendor. The cross-vendor version of this claim is unsupported, so read any comparison to a non-Claude price with that in mind.

### Strengths

 - Highest Artificial Analysis intelligence index observed (63)
- Flat pricing across the full 1M window — no long-context cliff
- Half the price of Fable 5 at equal-or-better measured intelligence
- Effort parameter (low through max) gives real cost/quality control
- Fast-mode variant available at 2x for latency-sensitive work

### Weaknesses

 - ~41s time-to-first-token at max effort
- ~30% more tokens for the same text than pre-4.7 models
- Fast mode is first-party API only and excluded from batch

### Reach for it when

 - Complex agentic coding
- Long-context document and codebase work
- Default frontier choice for enterprise workloads

### Avoid it if

 - Sub-second first token is required
- The task is simple enough for Sonnet 5

Sources: platform.claude.com · platform.claude.com · artificialanalysis.ai

### Every price dimension

| Input | $5.00 /M |
| --- | --- |
| Output | $25.00 /M |
| Cached input | $0.500 /M |
| Cache write | $6.25 /M |
| Cache write 1h | $10.00 /M |
| Web search | $0.01 /call |
| Batch discount | 50% |

### Independent scores

| Intelligence | 63.1 |
| --- | --- |
| Coding | 78 |
| Agentic | 59.2 |
| LMArena Elo | 1504.2 high |

Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.

#### Best rankings by task

 - svg #1 of 98 1368
- codecategories #2 of 145 1350
- uicomponent #2 of 140 1371
- 3d #2 of 136 1380
- website #3 of 151 1332
- gamedev #3 of 144 1381
- fullstack #3 of 59 1353
- dataviz #4 of 142 1358

### Capability

| Context window | 1M |
| --- | --- |
| Max output | 128K |
| Input modes | text, image, file |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |
| Open weights | no |

### Provenance

| Price source | openrouter.ai |
| --- | --- |
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |

A published time-to-first-token figure for this model was implausible (41s) and has been withheld rather than displayed.

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s flagship model for demanding reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agentic work. It is particularly strong at end-to-end software tasks, code review and bug finding, visual analysis...