Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 Unveiled With Faster Performance, Lower Cost Compared to Claude Opus 5

Highlights

• Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5.5
• Anthropic says new model can cost around 40 percent less than Opus 5
• It is the first model in its new Claude 5.5 family

Anthropic has introduced Claude Opus 5.5 as the first model in its new Claude 5.5 family. The company says the new model delivers a similar level of performance compared to its high-end Claude Fable 5.1 model on most work and it requiring significantly less compute than its predecessor. Claude Opus 5.5 is claimed to operate at up to 2.5 times the speed in fast mode. Anthropic says it requires substantially fewer tokens to complete complex tasks and leads in, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work on Anthropic's internal tests.

Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 Released: Pricing, Features

In a blog post, Anthropic has officially detailed Claude Opus 5.5. The new model, available starting September 22, is claimed to reduce overall operational costs by 40 percent compared to its predecessor. The company says Opus 5.5 completed a software migration involving around 680,000 lines of code in less than a day during a test.

Anthropic also said the model achieved page-load performance across 39 of 40 pages in a web application while avoiding the unwanted behavioural changes seen with the previous model.

Anthropic says the Opus 5.5 model will cost about 40 percent less than Opus 5 for typical workloads. It is priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Cache reads are priced at $0.20 per million tokens, which the company says is 60 percent less than Opus 5. Further, Anthropic claims that Opus 5.5 generates output more than 30 percent faster than Opus 5.

"Fast mode for Opus 5.5 is also available in Claude Code and the Claude Platform with up to 2.5x speed. It costs $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens", it added. It is shown to have scored higher on Terminal-Bench 4.0, OSWorld 2.0, and GDPval-AA v2.1 across 44 professional occupations.

The company has also increased five-hour usage limits for several Claude subscription plans. Developers can access a faster version of Opus 5.5 through Claude Code and the Claude Platform. The fast mode has separate pricing. Anthropic says the latest model was also evaluated by external organisations before release, including Frontier Design and METR.

Claude Opus 5.5 is now available on all platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. On the Claude Platform, it is available through the Claude API under the model identifier claude-opus-5-5. 

Anthropic has also confirmed that Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 are planned for release in the coming weeks. The company says they will ship with many of the same improvements to performance, efficiency, and safety.