Anthropic’s New Claude Opus 5.5 Matches Fable at 60% the Price

In brief

• Claude Opus 5.5 launched Tuesday priced at $4 and $20 per million input and output tokens, 40% cheaper than Opus 5 at default settings, while Anthropic says it matches Fable 5.1 on most tasks.
• On Anthropic's own numbers, Opus 5.5 leads Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 on coding and knowledge-work tests, but GPT-6 Astra still beats it on AutomationBench and Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1.
• It's the first model Anthropic has shipped since CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow AI capability gains, and it carries the same cybersecurity and biology safeguards as Fable 5.1.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday, the first model in what the company is calling its Claude 5.5 family. Anthropic says the new model performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1, its priciest flagship, on most tasks.

The twist is the model costs 20% less to run than Opus 5, the model it replaces, and it's 60% cheaper than Fable 5.1, the company's state-of-the-art offer.

The model, it appears, is very capable. It’s the most advanced model both in version (5.5 vs Fable’s 5.1) and family (Opus is the biggest model publicly available, followed by Sonnet with Haiku being the smallest one).

Anthropic admits the gap between Fable and Opus is narrower than its benchmark scores suggest, but being publicly available on plan, and being cheaper per token, makes this the obvious choice for most Claude users.