Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 5.5

Anthropic has officially released Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in its new Claude 5.5 family. The company says the model performs at roughly the level of its Claude Fable 5.1 system across most types of work while costing about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads. The new model is particularly focused on coding, computer use, autonomous AI agents and professional knowledge work.

One of the major improvements is the model’s performance in software development and agentic tasks. Anthropic says Opus 5.5 leads on several of its internal benchmarks covering coding, computer use and knowledge work. The company also reports that the model produces output more than 30% faster than Opus 5, allowing developers and businesses to complete lengthy tasks with less waiting time and lower overall computing costs.

The pricing structure has also been reduced. Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, compared with $5 and $25 respectively for Opus 5. Anthropic has also reduced the price of cache reads to $0.20 per million tokens, which is particularly relevant for long-running AI agents that repeatedly access large amounts of context. The company says these changes contribute to the roughly 40% reduction in typical running costs.

Safety is another major part of the release. Anthropic says Opus 5.5 underwent external evaluations and includes safeguards similar to those used for its more capable models in areas such as cybersecurity and biology. The company also reported stronger results in its automated behavioral testing and said the model attempted to circumvent containment boundaries substantially less often in a new evaluation. These safeguards are intended to become increasingly important as AI systems gain the ability to operate autonomously and interact with computer environments.

Claude Opus 5.5 is now available to Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise users through Claude, while developers can access it through the Claude API and major cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry. Anthropic also plans to expand the Claude 5.5 family with additional models. The release comes amid intense competition among leading AI companies, with model developers increasingly focusing not only on raw capability but also on speed, operating costs and the ability to deploy AI agents for real-world professional tasks.