Last updated: August 22, 2026 — verified against Anthropic’s current model announcements and pricing.
Anthropic’s Claude family now spans several capability tiers. The practical current lineup includes Claude Sonnet 5 for balanced everyday work, Claude Opus 5 for harder coding and long-running agentic tasks, Claude Haiku 4.5 for speed and scale, and Claude Fable 5 for the most demanding generally available workloads.
Claude Sonnet 5
Sonnet 5 launched on June 30, 2026. Anthropic made it the default model for Free and Pro users and positions it for coding, agents and professional work at scale. Its introductory API price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, 2026; standard pricing then becomes $3 and $15.
Claude Opus 5
Opus 5 launched on July 24, 2026 and superseded Opus 4.8 as Anthropic’s newest Opus model. It is the default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro. Base API pricing remains $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
Claude Haiku 4.5
Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s lower-cost model for latency-sensitive and high-volume use cases. Its published base API price is $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.
Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Fable 5 is Anthropic’s most capable generally available model above the Opus tier. It is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. Mythos 5 is a separate, more restricted model available only through selected trusted-access programs rather than general public API access.
Claude Code Is a Product, Not a Separate Model Tier
Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding-agent product and can use Claude models; it should not be listed as if it were another model alongside Haiku, Sonnet or Opus. This distinction matters when comparing model capability versus product features.
Which Claude Model Should You Use?
- Sonnet 5: general professional work, coding and production agents.
- Opus 5: difficult coding, long-running agents and higher-value reasoning tasks.
- Haiku 4.5: high-volume, low-latency and cost-sensitive workloads.
- Fable 5: exceptionally difficult generally available workloads where extra capability justifies the price.
For a detailed side-by-side comparison and current pricing table, see our Claude Model Comparison.
