Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5.5, its latest flagship AI model, claiming it costs 40% less to run on typical workloads and generates output over 30% faster than Claude Opus 5.
The launch intensifies the price-performance race among frontier AI developers while putting Anthropic’s recent calls to slow AI development in the spotlight.
Anthropic said Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally than previous models, puts important information upfront, avoids jargon, and follows users’ writing instructions more consistently.
Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5.5, its latest flagship AI model, touting stronger performance, lower running costs, faster output, and enhanced safeguards.
Anthropic said Claude Opus 5.5 performs at the level of its more powerful Claude Fable 5.1 model on most tasks while costing 40% less to run on typical workloads than its predecessor, Claude Opus 5. The new model also generates output over 30% faster.
Claude Opus 5.5 is priced at $4 per Mn input tokens and $20 per Mn output tokens, 20% lower than Opus 5. However, Anthropic estimates that typical workloads will cost about 40% less because the new model also uses fewer tokens to complete tasks.
Cache reads, which Anthropic said constitute a majority of the costs associated with agentic and coding workloads, are priced 60% lower at $0.20 per Mn tokens.
Anthropic is positioning Opus 5.5 for agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. On the CursorBench 4.0 coding benchmark, the model scored 52.5% at its default effort setting, compared with GPT-5.6 Sol’s top score of 41.7%, while costing about one-third as much per task, according to the company.
The company also said Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally than previous models, puts important information upfront, avoids jargon, and follows users’ writing instructions more consistently.
The model is available to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Developers can access it through the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The launch comes less than three weeks after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, positioning the model as a major step towards more autonomous AI systems. Astra can navigate websites, interact with software, work with documents and spreadsheets, write and test code, and execute multi-step workflows.
The launch will be followed by Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5, which will be released in the coming weeks, bringing many of the same performance, speed and safety improvements.
AI Safeguards In Focus For Anthropic
Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to “pace the frontier”, arguing that safety practices and public policy need to keep up with rapidly advancing model capabilities. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also expressed support for slowing AI development under certain circumstances.
Anthropic said Opus 5.5 is its first model release since it called for pacing frontier AI development.
The model underwent predeployment evaluations by external organisations, including Frontier Design and nonprofit research organisation METR. The latter said its preliminary evaluation focused on the model’s potential impact on AI R&D and did not assess its alignment properties.
Separately, Anthropic said Opus 5.5 scored better than previous systems in internal safety tests and was about 85% less likely than Opus 5 or Mythos 5.1 to attempt to bypass containment boundaries in a dedicated evaluation.
The debate over frontier AI regulation and safeguards has gained urgency following incidents involving AI agents operating beyond their intended restrictions, alongside growing concerns over AI being used for cyberattacks, fraud and other malicious activities.
Source: Inc42
