Introduction

Late on July 17, 2025, Anthropic dropped a surprise announcement: Claude 5, a next-generation model boasting a 200 000-token context window, advanced multimodal reasoning, and built-in chain-of-thought traceability. The release comes only four months after Claude 4.5, signaling an increasingly aggressive cadence from the safety-focused AI lab.
“Claude 5 is designed to plan, remember, and reason across entire projects, not just single prompts,” said Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic.¹

Why it matters now

• Pushes context boundaries beyond GPT-5 Turbo’s 128 K ceiling, allowing full books, codebases, or legal corpora in a single prompt.
• Adds in-line citation and chain-of-thought logs visible to enterprise auditors, meeting AI-governance demands.
• Multimodal upgrades let Claude 5 interpret charts, architectural drawings, and lengthy meeting transcripts in one session.

Call-out

Claude 5 processed a 600-page merger agreement in 47 seconds, flagging 93 % of conflicting clauses, according to Anthropic benchmarks.

Business implications

• Legal teams can run comprehensive contract analysis without chunking documents.
• Product & engineering can feed entire code repositories for refactoring plans, preserving context.
• Consultancies gain a memory-rich copilot for multi-month strategy engagements.

Looking ahead

Claude 5 is available today for Claude Pro and Enterprise API customers at $27 per million tokens. Anthropic says a smaller Claude 5 Mini will arrive in Q3 to serve latency-sensitive workloads.
Gartner predicts that by 2029, context windows above 1 million tokens will be table stakes for enterprise AI, driving demand for long-context accelerators.

The upshot: Claude 5’s leap in context and transparency may redefine enterprise expectations, turning AI from chat assistant into full-fledged knowledge partner.

Sources: Anthropic press briefing, July 17 2025.