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Impressive, it is very impressive and the ‘comeback’ Anthropic needed. However, when I am choosing a model for a coding, the cheap-looking winner is not automatically the cheap winner. Claude Opus 5 cuts Claude Fable 5 from $10/$50 to $5/$25 per million input/output tokens, while Artificial Analysis places Opus at 61 on its Intelligence Index and Fable at 60. That is a serious release.
But I would still route plenty of work to GPT-5.6 Sol. Artificial Analysis currently lists Sol at $1.04 per Intelligence Index task, against $2.03 for Opus 5 and $2.75 for Fable 5. Sol sits only two points behind Opus on the same index, at 59. The useful decision is no longer which launch has the loudest claim. It is which model, effort setting, and coding surface delivers acceptable work for the bill I am actually willing to pay.
I am Caspar Bannink, a solo technical founder. I build HomeScout, which is unrelated to the model comparison below. I care about this because model routing decides how much experimentation a small team can afford before a promising agent feature becomes an inference-cost problem.
The 61, 60, 59 headline is real, and it is incomplete #
Artificial Analysis currently puts Claude Opus 5 max at 61, Claude Fable 5 with fallback at 60, and GPT-5.6 Sol max at 59 on its…