Anthropic has just bested its previous best publicly-available model — and is offering it at half the price.
Claude Opus 5 has debuted at the top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 61, edging past Claude Fable 5’s 60 and pushing GPT-5.6 Sol into third place at 59. It’s a narrow gap on paper, one point separating first and second, but the context around that point is what makes this result notable.
Opus 5 is scoring 61 as a standalone, fully available model that anyone can call through the API today. Anthropic beating its own currently-available flagship while that flagship is hobbled by regulation is one thing. Doing it at a price Anthropic says is half of what Fable costs per task is the part that actually matters for anyone deciding which model to build on.
Where the rest of the field sits
The index has gotten considerably more crowded over the past month. GPT-5.6 Sol lands at 59, just behind Fable’s fallback score, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 follows close after at 57 — a genuinely strong showing for an open-weights model going up against the two most talked-about closed releases of the year. Grok 4.5 sits at 54, GLM-5.2 and Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 are tied at 51, and Gemini 3.6 Flash rounds out the models scoring above 50 at an even 50.
Below that band, DeepSeek V4 Pro and MiniMax-M3 are tied at 44, Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra sits at 38, and gpt-oss-120b brings up the rear at 24. What stands out looking at the full board is how many labs have now cleared the 50-point mark. A few months ago that threshold separated the frontier from everyone else. Now six different labs have a model above it, and the gap between first place and fifth place has compressed to single digits.
Why the price angle matters more than the point gap
A one-point lead at the top of a benchmark index rarely tells the whole story, and Anthropic knows this better than most labs on the chart. What’s changed with Opus 5 is the shape of the trade-off. Fable 5 was Anthropic’s answer to the question of raw capability, priced and gated accordingly. Opus 5 is being pitched as the model that gets you nearly all of that capability, running independently rather than through a fallback, at a fraction of the cost per task. Given how tightly bunched the top of the index has become, cost per point of intelligence is quickly turning into the metric labs actually compete on, not the top-line score itself.
That’s a shift worth watching. When the field was spread out, being three or four points ahead meant something concrete. Now that six labs are clustered within roughly ten points of each other, the model that delivers a score of 61 at half the price of the model sitting at 60 is arguably making the more compelling case, regardless of which one technically tops the chart this week.