Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 Introduces Five-Level Effort Parameter to Control AI Reasoning Cost
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, featuring an 'effort' parameter that lets developers control how much internal reasoning the model performs before responding. The parameter accepts five levels — low, medium, high, xhigh, and max — with 'high' set as the default when no configuration is specified. Higher effort levels consume more reasoning tokens, increasing both cost and latency, while lower levels reduce reasoning without necessarily shortening the visible text output. Developers migrating from Opus 4.8 are advised not to reuse prior effort settings, as Anthropic recalibrated the levels for the new model. For coding and agentic workloads, Anthropic recommends starting at 'xhigh' rather than 'max', reserving the maximum budget only when evaluations show a measurable quality gain.
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