Anthropic unveils Opus 5.5: powerful performance, still premium price

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Anthropic on Tuesday introduced Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in the Claude 5.5 family.

The vendor is trying to compete on price while appearing to follow its own principles, after CEO Dario Amodei called for a three-step plan to slow AI development by building the technology at a more restrained pace.

Amodei authored a widely read Sept. 13 blog post asserting that to moderate the development of AI technology, AI companies should allow third-party evaluators to examine the safety provisions of their models. Amodei also called for coordinating industry safety standards among vendors and the U.S. and other democratic governments.

Claude Opus 5.5 is good at advanced agentic coding, excelling at long, complex, multi-step software tasks and optimized for heavy knowledge workloads such as conducting financial research, complex document analysis and comprehensive writing tasks, Anthropic said. The model includes a feature that enables it to scale its reasoning based on the prompt it receives.

Opus 5.5 differs from Claude 5 in pricing: The model costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.

Comparatively, Opus 5 goes for $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.

But despite Anthropic slashing the model's price by 20%, Opus 5.5 is still more expensive than rival lab OpenAI’s GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models, also released on Tuesday. GPT-6 Sol is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. GPT-6 Luna costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $1.50 per million output tokens. The price of Opus 5.5 is a bit lower than OpenAI’s GPT-Astra, released on Sept. 3, which costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

The real pricing

Nevertheless, reducing token prices might not make much of a difference, said Hendrik Krack, developer advocate at CodeRabbit, an AI software development and change management vendor that automates code reviews for engineering teams.