Breaking

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 5.5 With Lower Pricing and Stronger Agentic Coding Focus

September 22, 2026 at 13:43 EDT

Foundation Models
AI Agents
Software Dev & Coding

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, positioning it as the first model in the Claude 5.5 family and a lower-cost daily driver for agentic coding and knowledge work. The company says the model performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work while costing 40% less to run than Claude Opus 5, with availability across Claude, the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

September 22, 2026 · Anthropic

Claude Opus 5.5 resets the coding-agent price race

The new Opus model lowers input and output token prices, cuts cache-read pricing by 60%, and is positioned as a daily driver for long-running coding and knowledge-work agents.

40%

Lower typical workload cost vs Opus 5

$4/$20

Input/output per million tokens

$0.20

Cache reads per million tokens

2.5x

Fast mode speed ceiling

Input token price, drawn to scale

Opus 5.5

Opus 5

$10

GPT-6 Astra

Each block represents $1 per million input tokens. Opus 5.5 is less than half Astra's listed input price.

Where it changes the workflow

Plan

Long codebase and knowledge-work tasks

→

Act

Tools, subagents and computer-use steps

→

Check

Clearer summaries and self-verification loops

Developer upside

Early testers reported fewer steps, lower token use and clearer responses during long coding sessions.

Watch points

Benchmark margins may overstate practical gaps, and high-risk cyber and biology work is governed by stricter safeguards.

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