Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 5.5, Cutting Prices From Opus 5

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, its first model in the Claude 5.5 family, through Claude Code and the Claude Platform. The company is positioning the new flagship around a practical promise: stronger performance for long-running agent tasks, at a lower cost than Opus 5.

The release makes Opus 5.5 Anthropic’s leading model for agentic coding, computer use and knowledge work, according to the company. It arrives after Anthropic’s prior Opus 5 model, with the company saying the new version needs less compute to serve and generates output more than 30% faster.

A lower price for work that runs long

Anthropic says Opus 5.5 costs 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads at default settings. Its listed price is $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, while cache reads cost $0.20 per million tokens. Cache reads matter especially for coding and agent tasks because the company says they make up most of those workloads’ costs.

There is also a faster, higher-priced option. Fast mode is available in Claude Code and the Claude Platform with up to 2.5 times the speed, at $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens. Anthropic is also increasing five-hour usage limits on its Pro, Max and Team plans.

Strong benchmark claims, with a warning attached

Anthropic reported leading results across its cited tests for coding, computer use and knowledge work. The company says Opus 5.5 scored 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, 54.4% on FrontierCode v1.1, 57.8% on CursorBench 4.0 and 81.8% partial on OSWorld 2.0.

What those tests are meant to measure

• Terminal-Bench 4.0 measures completion of complex, multi-step professional tasks in a command-line interface.
• FrontierCode measures whether an agent’s proposed code changes would be merged.
• CursorBench 4.0 uses ambiguous, multi-file coding tasks drawn from real Cursor sessions.

Anthropic also offers an important qualification to its own numbers: at this level of capability, it says benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. Unless noted otherwise, its published Opus 5.5 results use adaptive thinking at maximum effort, and some safety interventions can route sensitive benchmark tasks to earlier Claude models.

Safety remains part of the deployment boundary

Alongside the performance pitch, Anthropic says Opus 5.5 achieved its strongest result to date on the company’s automated behavioral audit, an alignment suite of simulated scenarios. It says the model is less likely than recent models to take hard-to-reverse actions or exceed assigned boundaries, and is more resistant to prompt injection than Opus 5.

For biology and cybersecurity work, Anthropic is retaining controlled access. Vetted organizations can apply to use Opus 5.5 through its Life Sciences Verification Program, while the company says it will expand its Cyber Verification Program in coming weeks. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 are also planned for the coming weeks, leaving the next question whether the flagship’s claimed cost and safety gains will carry across the family.