From 'Moral Exemplar' to Price Butcher: Who Did Anthropic's Cost-Performance Declaration Slap Down?

3 AM, I'm staring blankly at the lab screen, haven't finished reading a new paper on arXiv yet, when my phone pops up a notification: Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, performance close to Fable 5, price half as much. I nearly spilled coffee on my keyboard. Anthropic, the company that always keeps talking about "safety" and "alignment," actually starting a price war? As a first-year master's student who just joined the lab, I was stressing over which model to pick as a baseline; this news woke me up completely.