Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5.5: same-tier performance, 40% cheaper to run
The first release in the 5.5 family cuts typical workload cost by 40% and speeds up output by over 30% versus Opus 5, while matching Claude Fable 5.1 on most work -- Sonnet and Haiku 5.5 are next.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, the first model in a new 5.5 family. The pitch is efficiency over a capability leap: Anthropic says it matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most work while cutting typical workload cost by 40% versus Opus 5 and increasing output speed by more than 30%.
Pricing and specs
Opus 5.5 is priced at $4/$20 per million input/output tokens -- a 20% cut from Opus 5 -- with cached reads at $0.20 per million tokens, a 60% reduction. It carries a 1M-token context window, 128k max output tokens, and always-on adaptive thinking. Anthropic is positioning it for agentic coding and knowledge work specifically, rather than as a general across-the-board upgrade.
What's next
The model is available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure at launch. Anthropic has signaled Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 are coming within weeks, which would complete the family the way the 5.1 and 5 generations did. For teams already on Opus 5, the practical decision is a cost one: if Opus 5.5 genuinely holds Fable-5.1-level output on your workload, the 40% cost cut is a real number to check against your own usage rather than take at face value from the announcement.