Anthropic Introduces Claude Opus 5.5: Fable 5.1 Performance at 40%...

Anthropic Introduces Claude Opus 5.5: Fable 5.1 Performance at 40% Lower Price Than Opus 5

On September 22, 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5.5 — the first model in the Claude 5.5 lineup, which the company claims performs at the level of the flagship Claude Fable 5.1 and costs 40% less than Opus 5 for typical token-metered workloads.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-09-22Updated 2026-09-23

2026-09-22 Research Anthropic

🤖 Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper than the flagship

On September 22, Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5.5 — the first model in the Claude 5.5 lineup. Claimed: flagship Fable 5.1 level on most tasks and a price 40% lower than Opus 5 for typical workloads. Pricing: $4/$20 per million input/output tokens, cache $0.20 (−60%). Terminal-Bench 4.0: 66.4% vs. 55.8% for Fable 5.1, but Anthropic acknowledges the unreliability of such metrics.

🌍 Flagship Opus prices lowered for the first time — a price/quality shift for agentic processes where the model takes hundreds of steps and re-reads context. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 will follow.

👤 The model is already available in Claude Code, API, on Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, and with cloud providers. In Optiver and GitHub Copilot cases — the same results with 40–50% lower costs and half the steps. Fast mode ($8/$40 per million tokens) speeds up code by 2.5x.

Source 1: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5-5 Source 2: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/opus

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