Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 Costs Less and Answers Faster
The newest top model from Anthropic cuts API prices by 20 percent and writes more than 30 percent faster than the version before it.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22. It is the first model in the company's new Claude 5.5 family, and the headline is simple. It costs less and it is quicker.
Lower Prices for Developers
Businesses that use Claude through the API now pay $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Both prices are 20 percent lower than Opus 5. Reading from the cache costs $0.20 per million tokens, which 9to5Mac reports is 60 percent cheaper than before.
Anthropic says a typical workload now costs about 40 percent less to run than it did on Opus 5.
Faster and Close to the Top Model
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 produces text more than 30 percent faster than Opus 5. The company also says it matches Claude Fable 5.1, its most capable model, on most tasks. It pulls ahead in a few areas, such as coding agents, using a computer and reading charts.
Because it is that capable, Opus 5.5 ships with safety guardrails like the ones on Fable 5.1.
More Room on Paid Plans
People who pay for Claude also get something. Anthropic raised the five-hour usage limits on the Pro, Max and Team plans. Subscribers also got a one-time reset of their limits that they can save and use later.
A Busy Afternoon
OpenAI released its own new models about 90 minutes later, according to TechCrunch. The back-to-back launches show how close the race between the big AI labs has become. For regular users, that race keeps pushing prices down and speed up.
Questions Readers Ask
Do I need to change anything to use Claude Opus 5.5?
If you pay for Claude, look for it in the model menu. Developers can switch to the new model name in their API calls.
Are more Claude 5.5 models coming?
Yes. Anthropic says Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 will follow in the coming weeks.
Where This Came From
We confirmed the facts in this story against these reports. The words above are our own.
