Anthropic shipped a cheaper model that beats its own more expensive one on most published benchmarks — which inverts the usual logic of model tiers and makes the Fable 5 premium hard to justify for mainstream work. ........ Fable 5 launched June 9, 2026 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 output; Opus 5 followed on July 24, 2026 at exactly half that. Opus 5 wins five of nine directly comparable rows in Anthropic's own launch tables, including Frontier-Bench, GDPval-AA, Br