Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8
This is the rare generational upgrade with no price attached. Claude Opus 5, released July 24, 2026, costs exactly what Claude Opus 4.8 costs: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output. Every benchmark gain is therefore free in dollar terms, and on Anthropic's own launch table the gains are large. Computer use on OSWorld 2.0 goes from 55.7 to 70.6 percent. Agentic terminal coding on Frontier-Bench v0.1 more than doubles, 21.1 to 43.3. Knowledge work on GDPval-AA v2 climbs from 1593 to 1861. The starkest row is ARC-AGI-3, where Opus 4.8 scored 1.5 percent and Opus 5 scores 30.2. Treat all of it as vendor-reported until independent runs land. The catch is not cost, it is porting: three API defaults changed, and two of them can break working 4.8 code rather than merely alter output.
Head-to-Head Specs
| Spec | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Input Price | $5.00/1M | $5.00/1M |
| Output Price | $25.00/1M | $25.00/1M |
| Context Window | 1M | 1M |
| Released | 2026-07 | 2026-05 |
| Capabilities | text, vision, tool-use, code, reasoning | text, vision, tool-use, code |
Benchmark Scores
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Opus 4.8 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| OSWorld 2.0 | 70.6 | 55.7 | Claude |
| BrowseComp | 90.8 | 84.3 | Claude |
| FrontierCode v1.1 | 53.4 | 46.5 | Claude |
| Humanity's Last Exam (tools) | 64.7 | 57.9 | Claude |
See the full benchmark leaderboard for all models.
Category Breakdown
Both are $5 input and $25 output, so the upgrade carries no rate increase
Opus 5 scores 70.6 vs Opus 4.8 at 55.7, the widest capability gap on the launch table
Opus 5 scores 30.2 vs Opus 4.8 at 1.5, effectively a new capability rather than an increment
Opus 5 scores 43.3 vs Opus 4.8 at 21.1
Opus 5 scores 1861 vs Opus 4.8 at 1593
Opus 5 scores 90.8 vs Opus 4.8 at 84.3
Both ship 1 million tokens with up to 128K output; on Opus 5 the 1M figure is both the default and the maximum
Opus 5 caches prompts from 512 tokens vs 1024 on Opus 4.8, so shorter prompts start caching with no code change
Omitting the thinking parameter runs adaptive thinking on Opus 5 but no thinking on Opus 4.8, so a 4.8 request ported unchanged spends more tokens and can truncate against a tight max_tokens
Opus 4.8 is covered by Priority Tier; Opus 5 is excluded, and it draws on a separate rate-limit pool from the Opus 4.x models
Choose Claude Opus 5 when:
- ▸Computer-use and GUI automation, where the 15-point OSWorld gap is decisive
- ▸Long-horizon autonomous agent runs and complex multi-file coding
- ▸Agentic search and deep research workloads
- ▸Any 4.8 workload with room to re-test, since the price is identical
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 when:
- ▸Workloads on Priority Tier, which does not cover Opus 5
- ▸Latency-sensitive routes that deliberately disable thinking above high effort
- ▸Pipelines with prompts and evals tightly tuned to 4.8 behavior and no budget to re-tune
- ▸Capacity planning already sized against the shared Opus 4.x rate-limit pool
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Claude Opus 5 or Claude Opus 4.8?
It depends on your use case. Claude Opus 5 from Anthropic excels at computer-use and gui automation, where the 15-point osworld gap is decisive, while Claude Opus 4.8 from Anthropic is better for workloads on priority tier, which does not cover opus 5. See the full comparison above for detailed benchmarks and pricing.
How much does Claude Opus 5 cost compared to Claude Opus 4.8?
Claude Opus 5 costs $5.00 input and $25.00 output per 1M tokens. Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5.00 input and $25.00 output per 1M tokens.
What is the context window difference between Claude Opus 5 and Claude Opus 4.8?
Claude Opus 5 supports 1M tokens, while Claude Opus 4.8 supports 1M tokens.