Anthropic Ships Claude Opus 5. Double the Bench, Half the Price, and an 87-Minute Outage to Match

43.3% on Frontier-Bench v0.1. Opus 4.8 scored 18.7%. That's not an incremental bump, that's the same benchmark with a different shape of answer.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24 at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens, exactly half of Fable 5's $10/$50, while matching or beating Fable on most coding and knowledge-work evals (TechCrunch). ARC-AGI 3 went from 1.5% to 30.2%. Anthropic's own automated behavioral audit scores it 2.30 on their misaligned-behavior scale, the lowest of any recent Claude. It's live on Claude.ai, the API, Claude Code, and Cowork, default on Max, top model on Pro.

The pricing move is the interesting part. A frontier lab undercutting a competitor by 50% while claiming benchmark parity is a statement about inference cost structure, not generosity. Somebody's serving stack got meaningfully cheaper.

GitHub had it in Copilot the same week. The changelog dated 2026-07-24 rolls it out across VS Code, Visual Studio, Copilot CLI, the cloud agent, github.com, GitHub Mobile, JetBrains, Xcode, and Eclipse for Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise. Two operational details you'll hit: it's billed at provider API list price under usage-based billing rather than a flat premium multiplier, and Enterprise/Business admins have to explicitly enable it before anyone sees it. If your team says "we don't have Opus 5," check the admin toggle before you file a ticket.

Then this morning it fell over. Anthropic's status page opened an "Elevated errors for Opus 5" incident at 09:17 UTC on July 26, identified the cause at 09:45, shipped a fix at 10:34, resolved at 10:44 (Anthropic Status). Eighty-seven minutes. The blast radius covered claude.ai, Console, api.anthropic.com, Claude Code, and Cowork simultaneously, which means model layer, not surface layer. It pulled 70 points and 57 comments on Hacker News, and that's the part worth sitting with: a 90-minute degradation of one model now makes the front page because so many pipelines have exactly one model in them.

There's also a quieter thread. An r/ClaudeCode post surfaced on HN claims Claude Code carries a hardcoded instruction telling Opus 5 not to spawn subagents (HN). The "hardcoded" framing is single-source and unconfirmed. What is documented is Anthropic's own prompting guidance: don't delegate work you can finish yourself in a handful of tool calls, and don't use subagents to verify your own work. Third-party guides note Opus 5 delegates more readily than 4.8, which turns unbounded fan-out into a cost problem.

What I'd do: switch. The price/performance math is not close, and I've been running Opus 5 in Claude Code since Friday on my own projects. But instrument your fallback path this week, because today proved the failure mode is real and it's total. My pipeline has a single-model dependency I've been ignoring for months and this morning was the nudge.