AI Impact HubAnthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5, matching its flagship Fable model at about 40% lower cost
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in a new 5.5 family, which it says matches Fable 5.1 performance on most tasks while costing around 40% less to run than Opus 5 and generating output more than 30% faster. Token prices fall to $4 per million input and $20 per million output, with cache reads cut 60%. Anthropic names METR and Frontier Design as pre-release external testers, and says the model carries the same cybersecurity, biology and frontier-AI-development safeguards previously reserved for Fable 5.1. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 follow in coming weeks.
Why it matters: Anthropic's first release since its own CEO called for a slowdown is a price cut, and the external testing and safeguard tiering are the part that shows what "pace the frontier" means in practice.
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