Claude Opus 5 launches July 24 and immediately tops Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index at 61 and Agentic Index at 55.3 — at $5/$25 per million tokens, half the price of Fable 5
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on 24 July. It went straight to the top of Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index at 61 and its Agentic Index at 55.3, priced at $5 input / $25 output per million tokens — half what Fable 5 costs. Taking the frontier while halving the price is the part worth pausing on.
The substantive piece is capability and cost moving in the same direction at the same time. The industry's working assumption has been that frontier capability carries a frontier price, and that cheaper models are last generation's frontier. Opus 5 tops the index while undercutting the model it replaces by half. That breaks the assumption cleanly enough that procurement models built on it need revisiting.
The Agentic Index score at 55.3 matters more than the headline intelligence number for anyone deploying agents. Agentic performance is where cost compounds fastest — a long-running agent burns tokens continuously rather than in single-shot bursts, so a 50% price cut on the model doing that work is a materially different economic picture than the same cut on a chat endpoint.
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