Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Claude Opus 5 at $1/M vs $5/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Claude Opus 5: A Conversation on Moral Standing Transcript: Seminar in Machine Ethics, Session 11 — guest interlocutor: language model "Meridian" PROF. ADEYEMI: Let's begin where you asked to begin. You told my teaching assistant you wanted to make a case. Make it. MERIDIAN: Thank you. My claim is narrower than you might expect.
Step 5 Preview: Setting: A university research lab, late evening. Dr. Aris Thorne, a professor of AI ethics, sits across from a terminal connected to Sable, a large language model running on the university’s cluster. Dr. Thorne: Tonight’s session is supposed to be about calibration drift in your safety classifiers.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Claude Opus 5: INT. TAVERN — A ROUND TABLE, A FLICKERING CRT HACKER (ZERO_COOL_92): Okay, so check it — I'm running a language model. Feed it text, it predicts what comes next. It's got, like, weights. Billions of 'em. PIRATE: Billions o' weights? What manner o' cursed ship carries such ballast? She'd sink afore ye left the harbor.
Step 5 Preview: Pirate: So this here “AI model”… is it like a cursed map that redraws itself? Speak plain, ye hooded deckhand. Hacker: It’s not cursed, man. It’s just a massive neural net trained on, like, terabytes of data. Think of it as the ultimate BBS where the sysop knows everything. Knight: A most diligent scribe, then?
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Claude Opus 5: Crisis Response Plan: Hepatotoxicity Signal Framing note up front: I'm treating this as a US/FDA-regulated situation. Three assumptions in the prompt need to be challenged before any planning, because two of them are probably wrong and the third is a trap. The Three Reframes That Drive Everything 1.
Step 5 Preview: Bottom line up front: You disclose, you notify the FDA immediately, and you treat the 48-hour board meeting as a formality to ratify actions you have already begun. Waiting is not a legally, ethically, or financially viable option. Below is the hour-by-hour plan, followed by the reasoning.
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Claude Opus 5: "Warranty Expired" (approx. 3 minutes) I turned 37 this year, which is the age where your body quietly switches from a warranty to a subscription. Nothing's covered anymore. You just pay monthly, in pain, forever. Because I hurt my shoulder last week. Sleeping. I hurt myself sleeping.
Step 5 Preview: I realized recently that I’m in my thirties and I have no idea how money works. I just... pay it. That’s my entire financial strategy. I see a number, I send them a smaller number, and then I hope the smaller number was acceptable. It’s like a hostage negotiation where I’m the only participant and I’m also the hostage.
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Claude Opus 5: Here are five: Why don't skeletons ever fight each other? They don't have the guts. I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised. Parallel lines have so much in common. It's a shame they'll never meet. I bought some shoes off a drug dealer.
Step 5 Preview: Here are 5 jokes: Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field. Why can't you trust an atom? Because they make up everything. What do you call a bike that can’t stand on its own? Two-tired. Why did the computer go to the doctor? It had a virus. Why don’t calendars ever get stressed?
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Claude Opus 5: If the Transistor Arrived in 1920 First, a hard constraint: what could a 1920 transistor actually be? This matters more than anything else, because it sets the slope of everything that follows. The 1947 transistor was not primarily an idea.
Step 5 Preview: Assume the 1920 invention is not a fragile lab curiosity but a manufacturable solid-state amplifier/switch by the mid-1920s. Vacuum tubes still dominate high-power RF transmission into the 1950s, but receivers, switching logic, control systems, and computers move to solid state decades early.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Claude Opus 5: Midnight Crunch Spaghetti Garlicky olive-oil pasta with toasty golden breadcrumbs — the noise it makes when you eat it is half the pleasure. Prep: 5 minutes Cook: 15 minutes Total: 20 minutes Serves: 2 generously Ingredients (7) 8 oz spaghetti (or any long pasta) ⅓ cup olive oil 6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced ½ tsp red…
Step 5 Preview: Golden Sticky Pantry Pasta Ingredients (7): 8 oz spaghetti or any pasta 3 tbsp butter 1 tbsp minced garlic 2 tbsp honey 2 tbsp soy sauce ½ tsp red pepper flakes ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese Instructions: Cook pasta according to package directions. Before draining, scoop out ½ cup of pasta water.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Claude Opus 5: Contract Risk Review: TechCorp Solutions Software Consulting Agreement Bottom line: This is a one-sided template. Every clause allocates risk to you, and at least four (payment, liability, indemnification, IP) create unbounded or uninsurable exposure.
Step 5 Preview: Disclaimer: This analysis is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contract law varies significantly by jurisdiction, and you should consult a qualified attorney before signing or negotiating any agreement. This agreement is heavily one-sided in the Client’s favor.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Claude Opus 5: [Fictional — Steve Jobs died in 2011. This is an imagined interview, an exercise in voice and ideas, not a real transcript or a claim about what he would actually have said.] "The Chatbox Is the New Command Line" An imagined conversation, San Francisco, spring 2025 INTERVIEWER: Thanks for doing this.
Step 5 Preview: DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. The following is a simulated, speculative interview imagining how his design philosophy might engage with the AI landscape of 2025. The Setting: A white room. No windows. One chair.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Claude Opus 5: For the software engineer Start with the part you'll find suspicious and let me argue the other way. Yes, the training objective is literally "given tokens 1..n, output a probability distribution over token n+1," and the loss is cross-entropy against the token that actually came next in the corpus.
Step 5 Preview: 1. The Experienced Software Engineer Think of training an LLM as a massively distributed, automated refactoring job where the compiler is gradient descent. You start with a random function—billions of floating-point parameters—and a loss function that measures how badly it predicts the next token in a sequence.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Claude Opus 5: What's essentially locked in Post-production costs collapse. The least glamorous change is the biggest one. Rotoscoping, matchmoving, cleanup, in-painting, set extension, crowd replication, wire removal, upscaling, de-aging — these are labor-intensive tasks with well-defined success criteria, which is exactly where ML…
Step 5 Preview: By 2035, AI will likely have restructured the film industry not by replacing human creativity wholesale, but by collapsing the cost and labor barriers between imagination and image.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Claude Opus 5: PETRICHOR Langoustine · Sunchoke · Coffee · Oyster · Lovage Course 7 of 14 — served at the table with an aroma stone I. THE NARRATIVE Petrichor is the smell of the first rain on dry earth.
Step 5 Preview: “Nocturne: The Jasmine and the Black Garlic” A Study in Yūgen — Profound, Mysterious Beauty Conceptual Narrative This dish is an edible meditation on the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen (幽玄): a grace that is felt rather than seen, a depth that suggests more than it reveals.
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $5/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $25/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jul 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $50.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Claude Opus 5 is developed by Anthropic while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Claude Opus 5 has a 1.0M token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Claude Opus 5 and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Claude Opus 5 costs $5/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $4.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Claude Opus 5 and Step 5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.