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Comment by dd8601fn | Hacker News Reader

At half the price and less likely to auto-downgrade, it sounds like a reasonable claim.

> At half the price and less likely to auto-downgrade, it sounds like a reasonable claim

Two benchmarks (artificial analysis and vals) show a increase in cost (a insane increase for vals compared to Opus 4.8).

Already posted this before, so here is the link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041158

But better cost for the same performance. According to AA, Opus 5 _medium_ is as smart as Opus 4.8 _max_, at 1/3 the cost and twice the speed. And if you need a better response, you can turn it up to 11.

Then your comparing to a level of GPT 5.6 High, what is 50% cheaper then Opus Medium for the same intelligence / score.

You see the issue, if you try to scale effort down, you also need to compare how other competing models compare.

given that i couldn't even use fable without it downgrading to Opus, this is just a straight upgrade for me

Opus 5 also downgrades. it's now Fable -> Opus 5 ; Opus 5 -> Opus 4.8. Unclear why they want to nerf their own products with sometimes right classifiers. I guess the government ban might've been real and not coordinated marketing?

I don't understand why people believe this conspiracy theory of "oh the government ban was just marketing". That claim feels so incredibly ridiculous to me. It cost Anthropic a ton of money and reputation, and worst of all: it absolutely killed their competitive advantage. They were 1-2 months ahead of OpenAI, but trump conveniently gave OpenAI the time they needed to catch up and push 5.6 out the door without having to lose their subscriber base to the competitor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com