> At half the price and less likely to auto-downgrade, it sounds like a reasonable claim
Two benchmarks (artificial analysis and vals) show a increase in cost (a insane increase for vals compared to Opus 4.8).
Already posted this before, so here is the link.
But better cost for the same performance. According to AA, Opus 5 _medium_ is as smart as Opus 4.8 _max_, at 1/3 the cost and twice the speed. And if you need a better response, you can turn it up to 11.
Then your comparing to a level of GPT 5.6 High, what is 50% cheaper then Opus Medium for the same intelligence / score.
You see the issue, if you try to scale effort down, you also need to compare how other competing models compare.