Opus 5

2026-09-18

MODELS · 4 SOURCES · Anthropic · TechCrunch AI · The Verge AI · The Decoder

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5 — lower-cost model claiming near‑frontier performance

Anthropic announced Claude Opus 5, a new model positioned as a cost‑efficient successor to Opus 4.8 and the new default on Claude Max (and the strongest on Claude Pro). Anthropic says Opus 5 matches or exceeds prior models on many coding, knowledge‑work and scientific benchmarks (Frontier‑Bench, GDPval‑AA, CursorBench, ARC‑AGI, Zapier AutomationBench, OSWorld) at lower cost per task while remaining behind Mythos 5 on security and biology frontier tasks; the company also reports improved alignment and safety in pre‑deployment audits and links a System Card for more details.

8.0

2026-09-16

MODELS · 1 SOURCE · xAI

LatchBio analysis finds Grok 4.6 best at refusing disguised biohazard tasks on BioSecBench

LatchBio published an independent analysis of Grok 4.6 using its BioSecBench suites. On BioSecBench-Refusal Grok 4.6 achieved the top results across harnesses (trial-weighted harmonic mean 62.1%), refusing 59.2% of red-team tasks while completing 64.8% of routine tasks (the only model >50% on both); on BioSecBench-Surveillance it averaged 53.5% success, behind Opus 5 and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol. The report says evaluations used multiple agent harnesses and effort levels and includes additional routine biological capability results (e.g., SpatialBench, TxBench-PP) at benchmarks.bio.

7.0

2026-09-16

MODELS · 1 SOURCE · Anthropic

Fable 5 updates biology safeguards, cutting biology-related fallbacks by ~85%

Developers updated Fable 5’s biology safety classifiers to substantially reduce false positives; internal testing shows about an 85% reduction in biology-related fallbacks, so users will experience far fewer automatic switches to the less-capable Opus 5 for everyday health, educational, and some clinical queries. The system still routes requests in high-risk dual-use domains (e.g., virology, toxicology, molecular design) to Opus 5, and the team says it will use trusted-access pathways before enabling frontier biology capabilities more broadly.

8.0

2026-09-04

MODELS · 1 SOURCE · GitHub AI & ML

Project HydraFusion research preview brings multi-model orchestration to GitHub Copilot

GitHub announced a research preview of Project HydraFusion in GitHub Copilot. In controlled offline evaluations, HydraFusion’s selective coding workflows matched or exceeded the evaluated Opus 5 baseline while reducing estimated workflow cost, according to a post on the GitHub Blog.

6.0