Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 5.5 packs more brains for fewer bucks

It’s 30% faster and 40% cheaper than Opus 5. Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 5.5 packs more brains for fewer bucks. Claude Opus 5.5 offers faster coding and improved AI performance.

The model generates responses over 30% faster and costs roughly 40% less to run than Opus 5. Anthropic is increasing usage limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. When it comes to AI, performance, accuracy, and pricing are the biggest considerations for power users.

With Claude Opus 5, Anthropic achieved impressive results on the performance and accuracy fronts, but access to the model came at a premium. With the company’s latest model released today, that’s less of a concern. Anthropic announced Claude Opus 5.5 today, and the new model promises not only better performance and accuracy, but also a roughly 40% reduction in running costs compared to Opus 5.

I thought we were supposed to be slowing down the frontier. Anthropic and OpenAI announce more powerful (and cheaper) AI models.

News AI Anthropic and OpenAI announce more powerful (and cheaper) AI models After a lot of back and forth about slowing the pace of AI development, both companies are releasing new models. Both companies are iterating on their previous releases, Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, with new models that offer similar levels of performance but at lower costs.

In the case of Claude, Anthropic says its new Opus 5.5 model is better at handling complex work, "finding and fixing inefficiencies in software" and financial analysis and business work — all pitches laser-targeted at Anthropic’s enterprise customers. Anthropic’s benchmarks claim Opus 5.5 also scored better at agentic coding than GPT-6 Astra on both Terminal-Bench 4.0 and FrontierCode v1.1 (Main), which could make it more appealing for developers.

Improvements extend outside of the tasks the model can handle and to how it works: Anthropic claims Opus 5.5 produces writing that’s easier to understand, and that it "attempted to circumvent boundaries around 85 percent less often" than past models, suggesting it’ll disobey directions less often. Equally important, the company claims it costs less per token to use ($4 for input tokens and $20 for output tokens, compared to the $5 input and $25 output of Opus 5).

OpenAI’s new GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models are similarly focused on efficiency. The new models were trained using similar methods to GPT-6 Astra and offer improvements across professional work, coding and computer use, but for up to 50 percent cheaper than the promotional pricing of their GPT-5.6 counterparts.