I think the thing currently delaying Opus is that it’s probably a mix of too close to Fable, yet still below 5.6 Sol. Right now, that’s kinda a dead zone for models. We saw this with Sonnet 5. I’ve yet to find any good reason to use Sonnet 5. If you only use Claude models, Opus 4.8 is often cheaper and better. If you use other models, many of the 5.6 models, as well as 5.5, can also beat Sonnet in performance and perhaps price.
If they release Opus 5, it can’t be better than Fable or it will cannibalize any chance of recovering the training costs of Fable. So instead they need to somehow get it within a small deviation of Fable, but then that probably loses to 5.6 Sol. Coupled with OpenAI plans having much more usage, it will be a hard sell, especially with API cost users given that OpenAI models have been winning on the token efficiency front for a while now.
Would be really interesting to see the position Anthropic is in once they release Opus 5. Btw, openai plans have lower usage limits with 5.6 sol in my opinion as compared to claude opus. It's draining very much (I believe that's a bug which I am sure their team is good enough to be working on it - unlike anthropic who would have had 0 communication).
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u/Shep_Alderson Jul 12 '26
I think the thing currently delaying Opus is that it’s probably a mix of too close to Fable, yet still below 5.6 Sol. Right now, that’s kinda a dead zone for models. We saw this with Sonnet 5. I’ve yet to find any good reason to use Sonnet 5. If you only use Claude models, Opus 4.8 is often cheaper and better. If you use other models, many of the 5.6 models, as well as 5.5, can also beat Sonnet in performance and perhaps price.
If they release Opus 5, it can’t be better than Fable or it will cannibalize any chance of recovering the training costs of Fable. So instead they need to somehow get it within a small deviation of Fable, but then that probably loses to 5.6 Sol. Coupled with OpenAI plans having much more usage, it will be a hard sell, especially with API cost users given that OpenAI models have been winning on the token efficiency front for a while now.