Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5 with lower prices and tighter safety controls

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026. It is the first model in the new Claude 5.5 family, and the pitch is simple: more capability for less money. The company claims Opus 5.5 performs on par with Fable 5.1, its higher-tier model, while costing noticeably less to run than Opus 5. Cheaper tokens, cheaper cache, cheaper everything Opus 5.5 is priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. That works out to approximately 20% less than what Opus 5 charged. The bigger cut came on cache reads. Those fell 60% to $0.20 per million tokens. Combine the lower list prices with the cache discount, and typical workloads on Opus 5.5 come out approximately 40% cheaper overall than on its predecessor. The model is available through the Claude API, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft. Early usage data suggests the discount is landing. Token volume rose 3.6 times following the release, a sign that lower per-task costs are pulling in more customer activity rather than simply shrinking the bill. The safety numbers Anthropic paired the launch with external safety evaluations from organizations including Frontier Design and METR. Those assessments...