Claude Opus 5.5: Anthropic's model that performs like Fable and costs less
September 22, 2026 · JICA LABS
On September 22, 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in its new 5.5 family. The pitch is unusual: more capability for less money.
The key points
- Performance: according to Anthropic, it performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 — its largest model — on most work, and beats it at agentic coding, knowledge work, computer use and chart reading.
- Cost: it is 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5. In the API it costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, versus $5 and $25 for Opus 5.
- Speed: it generates output more than 30% faster than its predecessor.
- Style: it uses less jargon and puts the important information at the start of its messages.
A striking example
Among its results, Anthropic highlights a 680,000-line code migration completed in under a day. On public benchmarks it reports, for example, 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and 57.8% on CursorBench 4.0.
Where it is available
From launch day it is available in the Claude apps (Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans), in Anthropic's API as claude-opus-5-5, and on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Anthropic said Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 will follow in the coming weeks with similar improvements.
Why it matters
The industry pattern had been that each more capable model was also more expensive. A model matching a larger one at a lower cost makes this level of AI practical for tasks where it did not pay off before. That same day, OpenAI answered with cheaper models of its own: see GPT-6 Sol and Luna. For a side-by-side look at what each costs, see our Claude vs GPT-6 vs Gemini pricing comparison.
Fun fact: these JICA LABS pages were built with help from Claude.