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Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5.5 With $4/$20 Token Pricing and Lower Agent Costs

September 22, 2026 at 15:17 EDT

Foundation Models
AI Agents
Software Dev & Coding

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, positioning the model as a lower-cost flagship for long-running coding agents and professional knowledge work. The company says the new Opus model costs 40% less to run than Claude Opus 5 on typical token-billed workloads, with API pricing set at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.

September 22, 2026 · Anthropic

Claude Opus 5.5 cuts the cost of frontier agents

The new Opus model lands at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, with Anthropic claiming a 40% lower typical workload cost than Opus 5.

Input tokens per MTok

$20

Output tokens per MTok

40%

Lower typical workload cost

$0.20

Cache reads per MTok

Output price per million tokens

Each stacked block represents $5, making the price gap visible at a glance.

$20

Opus 5.5

$25

Opus 5

$50

GPT-6 Astra

Why builders care

Lower per-token pricing, cheaper cache reads, fewer reported tool calls and clearer writing make long agent sessions cheaper to run and easier to review.

Where teams must adapt

Thinking stays on, forced tool use changes, and some progress text now appears through thinking blocks, so integrations may need updates.

Available now for agentic coding and knowledge work

MODEL ID

claude-opus-5-5

CONTEXT

1M tokens, 128K max output

FAST MODE

Up to 2.5x faster at $8/$40

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