Antropic Counters Chinese AI Cost War with High-Performance Claude Opus 5

Antropic has unveiled its latest AI model, Claude Opus 5, offering near-top-tier performance at half the cost of previous models. Facing pressure from Chinese competitors like Mushot AI's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek, Antropic is strengthening its market position with a cost-effective flagship model. The new model, positioned as the foundation for Claude Max and usable in Claude Pro, maintains top-tier performance while reducing costs. Pricing remains unchanged from Opus 4.8, with input tokens at $5 per 1 million and output tokens at $25 per 1 million. Benchmarks show Opus 5 delivers twice the performance of its predecessor at similar costs, outperforming competitors like DeepSeek's Pable 5 by up to 50% in cost efficiency. These improvements target enterprise cost reduction, as businesses increasingly prioritize cost efficiency over token pricing when selecting AI models.