Claude Opus 5 is out — and it lets you trade cost against effort

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026. It is their new flagship, and it went out across the Claude apps and the API on the same day.

The effort control

The change most people will feel is a setting that decides how much effort the model spends on your question — low, medium or high, with a higher tier again for the hardest work. Ask it something trivial and you are not paying for deep reasoning you did not need; hand it something genuinely difficult and you can turn it up.

This matters more here than it does elsewhere. When you are converting birr into a dollar subscription, being able to spend less on the easy 80% of your questions is a real saving rather than a rounding error.

The rest of it

• A 1 million token context window — long enough to hold an entire codebase or a full thesis in one conversation.
• Frontier-Bench v0.1: 43.3% on Frontier-Bench v0.1, against 21.1% for Opus 4.8.8. Roughly double, on a benchmark designed to be hard.
• API pricing is unchanged at 5 dollars per million input tokens and 25 per million output — the same as Opus 4.8 was. Subscription users do not pay per token, so this only matters if you are building something.

Should you switch?

If you already pay for Claude, you have Opus 5 — there is nothing to buy and nothing to do. If you are choosing between the three big assistants, our view has not changed much: Claude is still the one that writers and developers keep renewing, because it holds a long document in its head better than the others.

The bigger context window makes that lead wider rather than creating a new reason to switch. If ChatGPT or Gemini is already working for you, this release is not the thing that should change your mind.

Getting it in Ethiopia

Claude does not take Ethiopian cards, which is the usual wall. We set it up on your own email address and you pay us in birr. Claude is priced against the day's exchange rate rather than a fixed figure, so message us for today's number instead of trusting a price you read on a page last month.

Written by the Bezuale Solutions team in Addis Ababa. Questions? Message us on Telegram.