Claude Opus 5 Enters LiveBench at #3 Overall — Beats Fable 5 on Agentic Coding 61.3% to 46.9%
Claude Opus 5 Thinking xHigh has entered the LiveBench leaderboard at 80.3 overall — third place, behind GPT-5.6 Sol Max Effort (82.4) and Claude Fable 5 Max Effort (80.8). It is the first Anthropic model outside the Fable/Mythos line to clear 80 on the overall composite.
The more significant result is the Agentic Coding category.
Agentic Coding: Opus 5 vs Fable 5
| Model | Overall | Agentic Coding | $/task |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.6 Sol Max Effort | 82.4 | 65.6 | $0.589 |
| Claude Fable 5 Max Effort | 80.8 | 46.9 | $1.573 |
| Claude Opus 5 Thinking xHigh | 80.3 | 61.3 | $0.487 |
| GPT-5.5 Thinking xHigh | 79.9 | 52.1 | $0.530 |
| GPT-5.6 Terra Max Effort | 79.8 | 68.0 | $0.497 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 Thinking xHigh | 78.9 | 56.1 | $0.688 |
Fable 5 posts 46.9% on LiveBench Agentic Coding. Opus 5 posts 61.3% — a 14.4-point gap on the category designed to test multi-step, tool-using agent workflows.
That gap is not close. Among models above 79 overall, only GPT-5.6 Sol (65.6%) and GPT-5.6 Terra (68.0%) post higher agentic coding scores than Opus 5.
Fable 5’s 46.9% on agentic coding has been a consistent finding. It leads on language (90.7%) and mathematics (96.0%), but agentic execution is its documented weakness. Opus 5 flips that relationship: 61.3% agentic coding at 94.8% mathematics — within 1.2 points of Fable 5 on math, 14.4 ahead on autonomous work.
Cost
Opus 5 at $0.487 per successful task is 69% cheaper than Fable 5 at $1.573. It is also cheaper than GPT-5.5 ($0.530) and GPT-5.6 Sol ($0.589).
The only model in the top-six bracket cheaper than Opus 5 is GPT-5.6 Terra at $0.497 — a difference of $0.01 per task, with Terra leading agentic coding by 6.7 points.
Context
The July 24 Opus 5 launch claimed improvements in Frontier-Bench and ARC-AGI-3 relative to Fable 5 and Opus 4.8. LiveBench’s Agentic Coding category adds a third independent signal consistent with those results: Opus 5 closes the frontier agentic gap that made Fable 5 the default choice for complex coding agent deployments.
Fable 5 retains the lead on language and mathematics. If the task requires sustained multi-step autonomous execution, the numbers now point somewhere else.