Anthropic's new flagship cuts prices 40% and tops a third-party intelligence ranking
Frontier-level capability is getting markedly cheaper, intensifying the price war among top models; real-world performance still awaits independent use.
Original event 2026-09-26
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, with cache at $0.20; the company says typical workload costs drop about 40% versus Opus 5.
Blogger Zvi Mowshowitz writes that performance is close to the previous flagship Fable 5.1, and the evaluation firm Artificial Analysis ranks it first in intelligence at 58. A fast mode costs $8/$40 with up to 2.5x the speed.
In the same period OpenAI cut GPT-6 Sol by 50% to $2/$10 and Luna to $0.10/$0.50, sharpening price competition at the frontier.