Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in the Claude 5.5 series, claiming that its performance on most tasks is comparable to Claude Fable 5.1, with typical workload costs about 40% lower than Opus 5.

The pricing is set at $4 per million tokens for input and $20 for output, a 20% reduction from Opus 5's $5 and $25. Cache reads are priced at $0.20, down 60% from Opus 5's $0.50, which the company states is a major cost for agents and programming tasks. Cache writes are $5, compared to the previous generation's $6.25. Under default settings, output speed is over 30% faster. Fast mode can achieve up to about 2.5 times the speed in Claude Code and the platform.

The company claims that under default effort, FrontierCode outperforms GPT-6 Astra with a single-task cost of about 20%; Terminal Bench 4.0 is on par with Astra, with costs around 40%; CursorBench scores 11 points higher than GPT-5.6 Sol, with costs about one-third. An early tester completed around 680,000 lines of code migration in less than a day. The context window is 1 million tokens, with a maximum output of 128,000 tokens, knowledge cutoff in June 2026, and model ID is claude-opus-5-5.

Usage limits for Pro, Max, and Team subscriptions have been increased to five hours, and subscribers can reset their saved rate limits. The company states this is the first release following the call to "slow down the frontier," with behavior audit scores higher than existing models, more resistant to prompt injection, and fewer instances of overreach or irreversible actions. Thinking is enabled by default and cannot be turned off, and forced tool calls will result in errors.

Compared to Fable 5.1's $10 input and $50 output, Opus 5.5 is priced lower. Anthropic positions it for long-term agent programming and knowledge work, rather than the high-end Mythos/Fable. It is available through API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud.

This is a share grab driven by product price reductions. Buyers are developers and enterprises migrating agent and programming work from Fable or competitors to lower-priced options, while sellers are using the old Opus 5 or Fable pricing. Funds are flowing from high-priced frontier tiers to programming workflows with high cache hit rates; beneficiaries are agent coding clients billed by token, while those under pressure are still selling similar tasks at high prices with Fable and need to adapt code to the unturnable thinking and changing tool call rules.

Source: Public Information