Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5.5 at 40% Lower Cost With Improved Performance

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, positioning it as their most capable model to date while cutting overall task costs by approximately 40 percent compared to its predecessor. The price reduction stems from both lower per-token rates and the model's ability to complete tasks using fewer tokens. Cache read pricing dropped sharply from $0.50 to $0.20 per million tokens, a change seen as especially significant for long-running agent workflows that repeatedly access large contexts. On the same day, OpenAI also launched two lower-cost models, signaling that competition in the AI industry has shifted toward cost-efficiency per completed task rather than benchmark scores alone. Opus 5.5 is available via Anthropic's API as well as on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft platforms, though teams running production agent systems are advised to test thoroughly before upgrading due to several behavioral changes in the model.
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