Claude Opus 5 Costs 3x More Than Opus 4.8 by Default Despite Identical Pricing

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Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, which reached general availability on July 24, 2026, carries the same list price as Opus 4.8 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. However, independent testing found that Opus 5 billed 3.1 times more than Opus 4.8 on identical prompts, because it enables 'adaptive thinking' by default and charges for hidden reasoning tokens the user never sees. Disabling thinking via a specific parameter setting brought both models to exact cost parity, though this option is rejected outright by the higher-tier Fable 5 model. The cost gap narrows significantly in agentic workflows, where adaptive thinking rarely activates, making tool-heavy and batch scenarios nearly price-equivalent between the two models. Opus 5 also halves the cache floor to 512 tokens and does not carry Fable 5's mandatory 30-day data retention requirement, offering practical compliance advantages for enterprise users.

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