Anthropic on September 22, 2026 introduced Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in its new Claude 5.5 family. The company says Opus 5.5 performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work and costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads.
Pricing on the Claude Platform is $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, a 20% cut versus Opus 5, with cache reads at $0.20 per million tokens (60% lower than Opus 5). Anthropic also reports more than 30% faster output generation. Fast mode is available at $8 / $40 per million input / output tokens. The company says Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 will follow in the coming weeks.
Opus 5.5 is Anthropic’s first model release since CEO Dario Amodei called for pacing the frontier. Anthropic says the model was evaluated before release by external groups including Frontier Design and METR, and that on its automated behavioral audit Opus 5.5 is the strongest-performing model it has tested to date. Because the company rates Opus 5.5 as comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, it is deploying Fable-class safeguards in those domains, with Life Sciences and Cyber Verification programs for vetted access.
Anthropic positions Opus 5.5 as a step up from Opus 5 on agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work, while emphasizing clearer, less jargon-heavy writing. The model is available across Anthropic’s platforms and major clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, with the Claude Platform ID `claude-opus-5-5`.
DigiEditorial verified these claims against Anthropic’s primary announcement and corroborating coverage from TechCrunch and Fortune; independent reproduction of Anthropic’s internal benchmarks was not available at publish time.