> 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

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MagnumOpus an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	benjiro29 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.