# Opus 5 vs Fable 5: claimed benchmark wins at half the price

> A creator claims Opus 5 beats Fable 5 on most benchmarks except health and legal, at $5/$25 per million tokens, roughly half the price.

Published: 2026-07-26
URL: https://daniliants.com/insights/opus-5-vs-fable-5-claimed-benchmark-wins-at-half-the-price/
Tags: frontier-models, llm-benchmarks, pricing, ai-safety

---

## Summary

A short creator take on the Opus 5 release, claiming it beats Fable 5 on most benchmarks except health and legal domains while costing roughly half as much per token. The video also claims Opus 5 applies fewer safety guardrails on sensitive topics like cybersecurity and biology than the comparison model.

## Key Insight

- Claimed pricing: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, pitched as roughly 50% cheaper than the rival model at similar quality.
- Claimed benchmark pattern: the rival model still wins on health and legal-domain tasks, and even on multidisciplinary reasoning once tool calls are involved, but loses on most general benchmarks.
- Efficiency framing: unlike a prior case where a "cheaper" model turned out token-inefficient in practice, raising real-world cost despite the lower sticker price, this model is claimed to be efficient on both list price and actual token usage.
- Guardrail claim: fewer refusals or downgrades to a weaker model on cybersecurity and biology questions, but explicitly not as strong as top models at finding zero-day exploits, which the creator frames as the reason looser guardrails are tolerated.
- No official benchmark source, methodology, or named benchmark suite is cited in the video, so treat all figures as a single creator's unverified claims, not primary-source data.