Anthropic bets on cheaper AI with new model

Anthropic on Friday released Claude Opus 5, a new artificial intelligence model the company says approaches the performance of its most powerful system at half the price.

The San Francisco-based startup, a chief rival to OpenAI, said the model tops industry benchmarks for coding and knowledge work while consuming fewer computing resources than earlier versions.

The claim addressed the rising concerns of business customers who have baulked at the expense of running advanced AI systems.

Claude competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and customers pay based on the amount of work performed, measured in units called tokens.

Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, half the price of Fable 5, Anthropic’s most expensive publicly available offering.

The company said the new model performs close to Fable 5 across many tasks despite the lower cost.

Cost has become a major issue after Anthropic and its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, both filed for stock market listings in June.

Wall Street is scrutinising their business performance more closely than ever ahead of their market debuts.

On cybersecurity, Anthropic said it deliberately avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks, and that the model remains behind Mythos 5 — its most capable and most tightly restricted system, available only to select partners — on both offensive cyber work and biological research capabilities that could be misused.

Mythos is Anthropic’s most advanced series of AI models, and its strength at finding weaknesses in computer systems — and at turning those weaknesses into working attacks — has caused controversy and pushed the company to build tight guardrails around them.

The company said Opus 5 finds software flaws about as well as Mythos 5 but lags far behind in turning those flaws into something that could be weaponised into an attack.

Citing the reduced risk, Anthropic said its automated safety filters will intervene roughly 85 per cent less often on Opus 5 than on Fable 5, the Mythos-class model it released last month.

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were briefly pulled from public access in June after the US Commerce Department imposed export controls, which were lifted at the end of that month. ...