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.