Anthropic says Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 "on most tasks" while costing about 40% less to run than Opus 5; Opus 5.5 costs $4/1M input and $20/1M output tokens (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)

Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 appears to deliver near-parity performance with its prior model on most tasks while reducing inference costs by about 40%, which could materially improve the economics of deploying AI at scale. For CIOs and technology leaders, this signals a faster path to broader enterprise adoption: more workloads may become cost-justifiable, but IT teams will still need to evaluate model selection, routing, and governance to ensure the right balance of performance, cost, and risk. The new token pricing also underscores that AI strategy is increasingly a procurement and architecture decision, not just an innovation experiment.