Three releases landed in one week: Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol/Luna arrived in GitHub Copilot on September 22, and Sonnet 5.5 followed on September 28. I don't think the top end is the story. The story is cost: the cheap tiers now compete with last month's premium models. Every benchmark number below is vendor-reported, so read it as a claim, not a measurement.
Claude Fable is the most capable model Anthropic has shipped — above Opus class, frontier reasoning, genuinely impressive on hard problems. It's also the fastest way to burn through your token budget if you haven't built the discipline to use it correctly. Most developers will reach for it because it's the best, use it for tasks Haiku could handle, and wonder why their costs exploded. This post is about earning the right to use Fable by mastering the cheaper models first.
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.7. Opus 4.6 has been central to our workflow — it powers Claude Code, our ⭐ recommended agent for complex tasks — so any new Opus release is worth paying attention to. That said, our first impression is that this isn't the across-the-board leap some might expect. Here's what we know and what we think.