Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance

Anthropic called it "the strongest-performing model we've tested to date." Anthropic’s newest model, Opus 5.5, was released on Tuesday, setting a new state-of-the-art in coding and knowledge work performance, according to the company. Opus is the most capable and expensive tier in Anthropic’s three-tier Claude lineup; Sonnet sits in the middle, while Haiku is the fastest and cheapest. Notably, Anthropic says, the release outpaces the larger Fable model in many benchmarks and succeeded in a number of informal tasks that Fable failed to complete. The new model is also significantly cheaper than its predecessor. Output tokens will be charged at $20 per million tokens for Opus 5.5, compared to $25 for the previous model.

Other metrics have similar price drops. The model is also faster to run, reflecting an overall drop in the compute required to serve it. The new version also makes significant changes to how Opus communicates, with the Opus 5.5 less likely to use jargon and more likely to put important information at the start of its messages. The launch comes just two months after the release of Opus 5 on July 24. According to the announcement, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5, which are the next tiers in the lineup, will be released “in the coming weeks,” with similar performance improvements. Anthropic says that Opus 5.5 is