Anthropic Releases Opus 5.5: 40% Cheaper Flagship Model Dominates Motion Design with Code-Generated Video

Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026, a new flagship model priced 40% lower than its predecessor while matching the performance of the larger Claude Fable 5.1 on most benchmarks. The release marks a strategic shift toward efficiency—delivering output 30% faster and costing $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, down from Opus 5's higher pricing. Cache reads plummeted to $0.20 per million tokens, a 60% reduction, making it particularly valuable for agentic workloads that reuse system prompts.