Inkling vs. Claude Opus 5

Inkling is an open-weights multimodal AI model from Thinking Machines built to support customization, agentic workflows, coding, reasoning, vision, audio, and enterprise AI use cases. The model is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, 256 routed experts per MoE layer, and six routed experts active per token. It supports context windows up to 1 million tokens and was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens across text, images, audio, and video. Inkling is designed as a broad foundation model rather than a narrowly optimized benchmark model, giving it balanced capabilities across reasoning, coding, factuality, instruction following, vision, audio, tool use, and safety. Its controllable thinking effort lets developers adjust how much computation and generated reasoning the model uses, helping teams balance quality, latency, and cost for different production needs. The model can run agentic coding tasks, use tools, create web apps, generate polished multi-page artifacts, reason over long contexts, and work through iterative refinement loops. For multimodal tasks, Inkling can process images, answer questions about visual content, transcribe and reason over audio, follow spoken instructions, and combine visual reasoning with code-based tools such as Python. Thinking Machines trained Inkling for calibration, instruction following, factual reliability, refusal behavior, and safety across multiple modalities, including evaluations for dangerous capabilities and human-AI threat vectors. Inkling is available on Tinker for fine-tuning, with 64K and 256K context options, an Inkling Playground for testing, cookbook recipes, and support for multimodal post-training workflows. Its full weights are available on Hugging Face, and deployment support is available through APIs and infrastructure partners such as TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, Baseten, SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and transformers.

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s advanced Opus model designed for high-value coding, knowledge work, problem-solving, automation, scientific research, and everyday AI workflows. The model is positioned as a thoughtful and proactive system that approaches the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price. Anthropic says Claude Opus 5 delivers greatly improved performance for the same cost as Opus 4.8, with base pricing of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The model supports effort settings that allow customers to optimize for deeper intelligence or conserve tokens for faster and cheaper results. Claude Opus 5 performs especially well on software engineering evaluations, including tasks that require debugging, code generation, root-cause analysis, test creation, and multi-step implementation. It also shows strong results on knowledge work, business automation, computer use, novel problem solving, and research-heavy tasks. Anthropic highlights that Opus 5 is better at checking its own work, iterating until it succeeds, and building supporting tools when a task requires it. The model improves on Opus 4.8 across life sciences evaluations, including structural biology, organic chemistry, bioinformatics, molecular structure inference, and protein function tasks. Claude Opus 5 includes alignment and safety protections that aim to allow beneficial cybersecurity and biology use cases while restricting riskier exploit generation, penetration testing, and certain autonomous misuse scenarios. It is available on Claude Max as the default model, on Claude Pro as the strongest model, and through the Claude API as claude-opus-5, with a Fast mode that runs around 2.5 times the default speed.