Anthropic rolls out Opus 5 AI model

Anthropic on Friday launched Opus 5, its latest AI model that the startup says nears the capabilities of its more powerful cousin Fable 5 at half the price.

The San Francisco-based lab said the new Claude AI model ⁠was well suited for daily office and computer programming tasks.

In an interview with Reuters, Anthropic product leader Dianne Penn said the release, more efficient than May's Opus 4.8, reflected a rapid pace of development.

"We're building and continue to consistently deliver frontier intelligence and bring that as accessibly as possible with every model generation," said Penn.

In testing, Opus 5 was less capable of exploiting cyber vulnerabilities than Anthropic's top-shelf AI, so its ‌related ⁠safeguards are less restrictive than Fable 5's.

Opus 5 was also less susceptible to being tricked into misuse than Anthropic's other current models, the startup said.

Released in June, Anthropic's Fable 5 was temporarily unavailable following US concerns that its capabilities ⁠could be diverted to foreign military intelligence.

Users should pick Opus 5 for value and Fable 5 for "days-long, very autonomous projects," Penn said.

Asked about the Kimi K3 "open" model from China-based ⁠Moonshot, which the U.S. accused of freeloading off Anthropic, Penn said it "remains to be seen" how open-weight models generally perform on complicated real-world ⁠projects that users ask Claude to tackle.

Open-weight models allow users to download, run and customise the virtual brains of an AI, unlike proprietary models. —Reuters