From the prompting guide<https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...>:

> Claude Opus 5's default user-facing responses run longer than prior Opus models'.

The benchmarks do show Opus 5 as slightly more expensive than 4.8, although the scores are much higher.

This still feels like a step in the wrong direction, though, especially with OpenAI making so much progress with the efficiency of their models. Fable's token efficiency made it seem like Anthropic would start following OpenAI's approach but that doesn't seem to have carried over to their other models.

On a small, easily digestible task, I compared Fable to Opus and the cost of Fable was easily 2x despite being fewer tokens, and the output was not really better. Obviously, there are tasks where using Fable matters but honestly they're rather unusual. And for a lot of tasks I've found downgrading to Sonnet can be valuable because Fable and Opus are a lot more secretive about what they're doing, and it's impossible to "listen to them think" and stop them when they start making off-the-wall inferences/assumptions and going down bad paths.

I think in the long run tokens are probably the wrong thing; it's compute and cache memory that you need to be measuring, and when you look at it that way I suspect in most cases the models have pretty similar performance.

This is part of why I switched to Grok 4.5

I don't need more powerful models, I need one that responds fast enough that my attention doesn't wander to other tasks. Grok 4.5 is so fast I can just use it in-band without swapping to other tasks.

Slower than Opus 4.8, which was already miserably slow, is indeed a step in the wrong direction.

> This still feels like a step in the wrong direction, though, especially with OpenAI making so much progress with the efficiency of their models

Gemini also had modest increase before this - don't be surprised when OpenAI also has a "modest increase" with its next release. Cartel-like behaviour doesn't require direct communication when none of the participants are interested in participating in a margin-destroying price-war. All one needs to do is raise their price and watch how the competition react.

Such a scheme (and resulting high margins) would be imperilled by the existence of frontier open-weight models in the market, which may be why the reaction to Chinese models may be particularly shrill.

The final user-facing responses are usually a tiny fraction of the total tokens used over the course of a given conversation turn. When you're doing any real work, reasoning and tool uses constitute the overwhelming majority of the tokens in / out... not the final user-facing response.

Is that true? Sol responses are also longer than prior models.

> especially with OpenAI making so much progress with the efficiency of their models

To be fair though, Sol tends to go off the rails sometimes. It's much less reliable than Fable in its outputs. It tends to be overzealous in its research/changes.

This is a comment about user-facing responses, which are seldom the thing you're worried about when thinking about token efficiency.

It's a step in the wrong direction but also token efficiency has become a focus relatively recently (just the past few weeks it seems like the zeitgeist has turned it's attention to efficiency) while work on this model probably started many many months ago. I would expect to see models released that focus on token efficiency in 6-12 months

Almost completely disagree. Slightly more expensive, but significant better on a per-prompt basis? For non-trivial projects, the former is a small linear increase, the latter is a (somewhat-)exponential(-ish) cost/time/sanity savings.