September Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5.5, a new-generation AI model that the company says delivers performance comparable to its higher-end Claude Fable 5.1 while significantly reducing operating costs.

Anthropic announced the model on September 22, describing it as its strongest Opus model to date. The company said Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Claude Opus 5 on typical workloads.

Lower Cost for Advanced AI

Anthropic has set the price of Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. The company says this represents a 20% reduction from Opus 5 pricing.

The model also uses less computing power and generates output more than 30% faster than its predecessor under Anthropic’s testing conditions. Cache-read pricing has also been reduced substantially, which could be important for long-running AI-agent and coding workloads.

Focus on Coding and Professional Work

Claude Opus 5.5 has been designed for complex professional tasks, including software development, computer use, knowledge work and AI-agent workflows.

Anthropic says its internal evaluations showed strong results on several coding and agentic-work benchmarks. However, the company also cautions that benchmark differences at these capability levels do not necessarily translate directly into identical performance in real-world applications.

Greater Attention to AI Safety

The release comes amid increasing attention to the safety of increasingly capable AI systems.

Anthropic said Opus 5.5 underwent testing by external evaluators, including Frontier Design and METR, before release. The company also reported that the model was substantially less likely than earlier models to attempt to circumvent prescribed containment boundaries during its internal safety evaluations.

The company has added safeguards in areas such as cybersecurity and biology. For certain sensitive requests, Anthropic says its safety systems can route tasks to other models or apply additional restrictions.

Available Across Major Cloud Platforms

Claude Opus 5.5 is available through Anthropic’s platform as well as major cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The company is also expanding access for vetted researchers working in cybersecurity and life sciences.

More Claude Models Expected

Anthropic has announced plans for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5, which are expected to follow in the coming weeks.

The release of Opus 5.5 adds another major model to an increasingly competitive AI market, where companies are simultaneously seeking higher performance, lower operating costs and stronger safety controls.

For businesses and developers, the combination of advanced coding and agent capabilities with lower operating costs could make sophisticated AI systems more economical to deploy at scale.