Anthropic's Cheaper Opus Arrives Weeks Before Its IPO
September 22, 2026 - 5:24 pm
Credit: Anthropic
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, below the $5 and $25 that Opus 5 has carried since July, and says it performs similarly to the more expensive Fable 5.1 on most work. It is the first model since Dario Amodei called for third-party evaluation, which Article 55 of the AI Act has obliged in Europe since August 2025.
Key Takeaways:
- Price Drop: Opus 5.5 costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, down from the previous $5 and $25.
- Performance: It is built for long-running agentic coding and knowledge work with a one million token context window.
- Evaluation: METR and Frontier Design tested Opus 5.5 pre-release, incorporating safeguards like Fable’s to limit cybersecurity and biology risks.
- Regulatory Compliance: This release follows Dario Amodei's call for third-party evaluation, marking the first model since Europe's AI Act requirement came into effect last year.
- Market Shift: Customers are moving towards cheaper models, prompting Anthropic's price adjustment as they prepare for their IPO.
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