Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5 as GitHub adds it to Copilot

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, positioning the model as a new Opus-tier option for long-running agents, coding work, and professional tasks. The company says the model is available across its platforms and through the Claude API under the model name claude-opus-5, with pricing set at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, matching the prior Opus 4.8 price.

The launch matters because it is not only a model announcement from Anthropic. GitHub said the same day that Claude Opus 5 is rolling out inside GitHub Copilot for Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise users. Developers will be able to select it in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Copilot CLI, the GitHub Copilot cloud agent, the Copilot app, github.com, GitHub Mobile, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, and Eclipse. GitHub notes that the rollout is gradual, and that Copilot Business and Enterprise administrators must enable the Claude Opus 5 policy before their organizations can use it.

What changed

Anthropic describes Opus 5 as a step up for multi-step work where models need to reason, use tools, and stay coherent over longer sessions. GitHub's changelog highlights similar themes, saying its early testing found strong performance on agentic coding workflows including autonomous code changes, regression verification, and tasks that require coordinating multiple tools.

• Anthropic says Opus 5 is available today on Claude platforms and the Claude API.
• Base API pricing is listed at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
• A Fast mode is available at about 2.5 times the default speed, priced at twice the base Opus 5 rate on the Claude Platform and through Claude Code usage credits.
• GitHub Copilot availability spans major IDEs, mobile apps, CLI workflows, and the cloud agent, subject to rollout and admin policy settings.

Security controls are also part of the story. GitHub says the model includes enhanced safeguards for high-harm cyber content, which may block some cyber-related or security-adjacent requests. For engineering teams, that creates a tradeoff to evaluate: Opus 5 may be attractive for difficult coding and agent tasks, but administrators will need to account for policy enablement, usage-based billing, and the possibility that some security work requires clearer benign context or another model choice.

Sources

• www.anthropic.com
• github.blog

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