Five Opus releases, one price: Anthropic's flagship has not changed its rate since November — and the dearest Claude on sale is not a flagship

Anthropic has released five Opus-class models since 24 November 2025: Opus 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 and Opus 5. Every one of them is billed at exactly five dollars per million input tokens and twenty-five per million output. Eight months, five model numbers, one unchanged rate. That is the second stable plateau in the tier's history, and the first one lasted even longer. Claude 3 Opus launched in March 2024 at $15 / $75. Opus 4 in May 2025 charged $15 / $75. Opus 4.1 in August 2025 charged $15 / $75. Twenty months and three flagships went by without the price list moving. It moved once, on 24 November 2025, when Opus 4.5 cut the rate by two thirds — and it has not moved since. The practical consequence is easy to state: the current flagship, Opus 5 from 24 July 2026, costs one third of what the first Opus cost in March 2024, and there was no gradual glide between the two numbers. There was one step. The middle tier tells the same story with different digits. Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet, Sonnet 4, Sonnet 4.5 and Sonnet 4.6 were all sold at $3 / $15 — five models across twenty months at a single rate. Sonnet 5 broke it on 30 June 2026 at $2 / $10, and Anthropic then cancelled the increase back to $3 / $15 that it had scheduled for 1 September. Only the small tier has ever gone the other way: Claude 3 Haiku cost $0.25 / $1.25 in March 2024, and its successor 3.5 Haiku arrived at $1 / $5 — a fourfold rise that Haiku 4.5 has kept. The part that is easiest to miss sits at the top of the list. The most expensive Claude a customer can buy today is not Opus 5. Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, all published on 9 June 2026, are billed at $10 / $50 — double the flagship. Opus 4.8 hints at what that premium buys: its own fast mode is priced at $10 / $50 for roughly 2.5 times the speed. On Anthropic's price list, in other words, the second five-dollar step is not sold as a better model. It is sold as a faster one. The figures in this piece are taken from the release notes and price list entries recorded in the wujec.ai catalogue profile of every Claude model, and can be checked profile by profile.