Opus 5.5 cuts prices 40% and becomes the default, but heavy users save little
Opus 5.5 list prices drop 20% and it becomes the default model, yet max-effort per-task cost matches the previous generation; price your own workload.
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Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5 and made it the default model, with list prices down 20% — but real costs at high effort barely moved.
Launched September 22, the model is claimed to match Fable 5.1 on most tasks and run 40% cheaper than Opus 5. Input/output pricing fell from $5/$25 to $4/$20 per million tokens, and it is now the default in Claude Code and the Claude app.
Artificial Analysis, however, measured that higher token usage at max effort would raise per-task cost about 80%; after the price cut and cheaper caching it lands at $5.98 per Intelligence Index task, essentially flat versus Opus 5's $5.86. The 40% saving holds only at default effort.
Performance figures are vendor and partner numbers, and the unconfirmed claim that the model is smaller remains speculation; test cost on your own workload and effort setting before switching.