With this iteration they had a delay because when the Mythos was ready they had some sort of "Oh shit" moment and spent half a year adding safety guards to it. Then slowly rolled it out, but got another delay due to a government block. So, maybe the work on making Opus and Sonnet only started after they got a green light from the administration.
Presumably, now that they learned how to do this safety-wrapping the next iteration of Mythos / Fable / Opus / Sonnet is going to show up faster.
Something like that.
So I'm assuming at least a subset of employees could continue using the models during that time.
"Opus 5’s safeguards match those of Claude Fable 5’s, with one change: it now permits source-code vulnerability discovery at all access levels".
This is probably great news, but then again, where does this leave Fable as a choice?
Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8 seem about the same to me - the reason I switch between the two is I'd read that it's cheaper to use Sonnet 5 on those reasoning levels, and cheaper to use Opus 4.8 above them. This is due to them using different token quantities.
Fable is not better, it says zero information between steps and then output a summary. A perfect “send - done”.
Just Arg-AGI-3 is quoted above 20K USD and footnote says average of 5 runs (!!). Likely just a drop in the bucket to the training budget but still..
The cost they are quoting is API cost, so it's already inflated on that.