Their communication is confusing. They say "Opus 5 is not more capable overall than Fable 5", but their blog post proceeds to list how much better Opus 5 is than Fable 5 on __most__ benchmarks listed.
Then system card goes on to "Its AI R&D capabilities are comparable to those of Claude Mythos 5", which is supposed to be fable minus restrictions.
Easy enough to explain: they're benchmaxxing. Fable is intelligent but not benchmaxxed. Opus is less intelligent but benchmaxxed.
Capable in term of AI R&D, not capable in terms of hacking (which caused all the Fable drama.) But agree, confusing wording.
Maybe they don't want to say that to avoid the government scrutiny.
It seems they are trying to thread a needle here - they want to say it's very strong, but apparently this time do not want to invite extra government scrutiny.
They do say that (implicitly unlike Mythos) Opus 5 was not trained to exploit software vulnerabilities, which would certainly make it safer in that regard.
"As with its predecessor, Opus 4.8, we’ve intentionally avoided training Opus 5 on cyber tasks. The model has nevertheless improved substantially on these tasks as a result of becoming more generally capable, and it comes close to Mythos 5 at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities. However, it remains substantially behind Mythos 5 on the exploitation of those vulnerabilities—that is, in turning vulnerabilities into material cyber threats."