Claude Opus 5.5
We’re introducing Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family. It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5.
Claude Opus 5.5 is our first release since we called for pacing the frontier . It was tested before release by external evaluators, including Frontier Design and METR . On our automated behavioral audit, the most comprehensive alignment test we run, Opus 5.5 is the strongest-performing model we’ve tested to date. It also comes with the safeguards we’ve developed for our most capable models.
Here are some of the improvements you can expect from Opus 5.5:
Performance. Opus 5.5 is a major step up from Opus 5. It’s the new leading model, and early testers saw large jumps in performance on their most complex work. One tester completed a 680,000-line code migration in less than a day—work that would have taken an engineering team weeks. It’s good at finding and fixing inefficiencies in software: when we asked it to cut load times across every page of a web app, Opus 5.5 succeeded 39 of 40 times, while Opus 5 made smaller improvements that also altered the app’s behavior. A different tester had several Claude models build a game from a single prompt; Opus 5.5 scored higher than any other model on the strength of its graphics and polish.
Safety. Opus 5.5 achieves the best scores of any model to date on our automated behavioral audit, our alignment suite that tests Claude across thousands of simulated scenarios. It is much less likely than recent models to take hard-to-reverse actions or act outside the boundaries it’s been given, and it’s more resistant than Opus 5 to prompt injection. We’ve also broadened our alignment testing to cover longer tasks, impossible tasks, and scenarios modeled on real incidents, though it still has limits. Full details of our evaluation are available in the Opus 5.5 System Card .
Because Opus 5.5 is comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, we’re deploying it with safeguards similar to those on Claude Fable 5.1. Vetted organizations can apply today to our Life Sciences Verification Program to use Opus 5.5 for biology research. In the coming weeks we will also be expanding access to our Cyber Verification Program , and verified cybersecurity practitioners will be able to use Opus 5.5 for their work.
Cost and speed. Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that. Our tests show that at default settings it will cost 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads. Input and output tokens are $4 and $20 per million, 20% less than Opus 5. Cache reads (which make up the majority of agentic and coding work costs) are $0.20 per million tokens, 60% less than Opus 5. Opus 5.5 also generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5.
In addition to the price drop, we’re increasing five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. We’re also providing subscription users a rate limit reset, which you can now save and use whenever you choose.
Communication. Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally than prior models. Early testers found its writing clearer and easier to follow, which addresses some of the common feedback we heard about Opus 5. It puts the most important information up front, and its style makes it a better work partner over long sessions. As one early tester put it, “it writes the way I do.” In our own use, this has made Opus 5.5’s work easier to follow and check—which is a safety benefit as well as a practical one.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 will follow in the coming weeks, with many of the same improvements to performance, efficiency, and safety.
Performance and cost-effectiveness
On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.
Unless otherwise noted, all Claude Opus 5.5 results use adaptive thinking at max effort. Terminal-Bench 4.0 results are reported for Claude Opus 5.5 at xhigh effort and GPT-6 Astra at high effort, as reported by OpenAI; these represent each model’s highest score. Claude Opus 5.5 was evaluated with its production safeguards enabled. When they intervened, cybersecurity tasks were completed by Claude Opus 4.8, and biology and frontier LLM development tasks were completed by Claude Opus 5. This likely reduces Claude Opus 5.5’s performance on these benchmarks.
1 Terminal-Bench 4.0: The standard error is ±2.6 pts for Claude Opus 5.5 and ±1.6–2 pts for the other Claude models. The public leaderboard (5 trials/task, Claude Code harness) reports Claude Opus 5 at 51.8%; our setup reproduces it at 52.3%, within noise. GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 Sol figures are as reported by OpenAI.
2 AutomationBench: AutomationBench results were run and reported by Zapier. These runs were performed without fallback models, so safeguard interventions were considered failures—this resulted in a lower score than Claude Opus 5.5 would achieve in practice. Claude Opus 5.5 results come from Zapier’s own evaluation during early access. Results for Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and GPT-6 Astra come from Zapier’s public leaderboard.
3 Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1: The standard error is ±3.5–5 pts per model. The public leaderboard (3 trials/task, Claude Code harness) reports Claude Opus 5 at 30.0%; our setup reproduces it at 29.0%, within noise. The GPT-6 Astra figure is as reported by OpenAI.
Where Opus 5.5’s advantage is very clear is efficiency. It costs less per token than Opus 5 and uses fewer tokens per task, which nets out to a 40% drop in costs.
Fast mode for Opus 5.5 is also available in Claude Code and the Claude Platform with up to 2.5x speed. It costs $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens.
Coding
Opus 5.5 is particularly good at long and sprawling jobs like codebase-wide migrations and audits. An early tester used it to audit and fix a 200,000-line codebase in under three hours, where Opus 5 took over 20 hours and used 2.5x as many tokens. In an internal test, we asked Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 to translate HAProxy, widely used software that balances web traffic loads across servers, from C into Rust. Both rewrites passed nearly all of HAProxy’s own regression tests, but Opus 5.5 finished in 9.5 hours compared to 12 for Fable 5.1, and cost 51% less.
Opus 5.5 delivers frontier results on agentic coding at a fraction of the cost. At its default effort level on FrontierCode, it beats GPT-6 Astra at roughly 20% of the cost per task. On Terminal Bench 4.0, it matches Astra for about 40% of the cost, while on CursorBench it beats GPT-5.6 Sol by 11 points for about a third of the cost.
Terminal-Bench 4.0 measures how well a model can complete complex, multi-step professional tasks within a command line interface. Opus 5.5 at default effort beats Opus 5 at max effort for about a fifth of the cost. It matches GPT-6 Astra at about 40% of the cost.
FrontierCode measures whether an agent’s code changes would be merged. At default effort (medium), Opus 5.5 scores 54.6%, higher than all other models, beating GPT-6 Astra’s top score (53.3%) for about a fifth of the cost per task.
CursorBench evaluates coding agents on ambiguous, multi-file tasks taken from real Cursor sessions. At default effort (medium), Opus 5.5 scores 52.5%, compared to 51.8% for Fable 5.1 (max) and 46.6% for Opus 5 (max). It beats GPT-5.6 Sol’s top score (41.7%) by 11 points for about a third of the cost per task.
Our early testers reported similar efficiency and intelligence gains:
“Developers want agents that can take on real software work and finish it. In our testing across GitHub Copilot CLI and VS Code, Claude Opus 5.5 used among the fewest tokens and steps we measured. In VS Code, it solved more terminal tasks than Opus 5 in less than half the steps. More than making individual tasks more efficient, it’s making developers’ bigger projects more achievable.”
“I handed Claude Opus 5.5 a large engineering task across six of our repositories and let it run overnight, unattended. It stayed on task for over 18 hours defining how our services talk to each other and working out how each one should apply that. Compared with Opus 5, it hit milestones faster and required minimal reworking. Its code comments were short and useful instead of long and prose-heavy. I’m struggling to find anything negative to say.”
“For Lovable builders, Opus 5.5 means faster builds with the same quality, whether you’re starting from scratch or working on a live app. It gathers context once, makes fewer and more complete edits, and doesn’t get stuck retrying, finishing in a third to half fewer steps and using significantly fewer tokens along the way.”
“We tested Claude Opus 5.5 across Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code, the full range of how our teams work. A complex coding task that previously took 38 prompts over four days came in at 11 prompts over three hours, with more production-ready outputs and less rework. For our teams solving complex problems at pace, that means less time iterating and more time interrogating: testing assumptions, pressure-testing outputs, and landing on the best solution for our clients.”
“With Claude Opus 5.5, we’ve seen a clear improvement in token efficiency across our internal evaluations, as we’ve been able to complete the same tasks both cheaper and faster.”
“We test models on real engineering and trading-desk work. On our agentic coding tasks, Claude Opus 5.5 matched Opus 5’s quality in about half the turns, time and output tokens, cutting the cost of that workload by 40 to 50%. It posted the highest score we’ve recorded on one desk’s trading-support suite, passing tasks earlier Claude models had failed, and topped all eight models on our analysis task.”
“Claude Opus 5.5 delegates to subagents far more effectively and checks its own work in creative ways. Self-verification loops feel easier to set up. It found savings opportunities in our cloud bill that previous models had missed, and in code review it caught a bug by checking external docs for a third-party integration we’d modeled wrong several commits earlier.”
“Every call an agent makes is time and cost a developer feels. On a public benchmark of real command-line tasks, Claude Opus 5.5 solved more than Opus 5 while making about 40% fewer calls and using half the tokens. For developers building with Kiro, that means faster, more affordable agent sessions for routine tasks and complex challenges alike. Opus 5.5 will soon be available in Kiro.”
The most secure coding agent
Enterprises that use agents within their systems need to know that those agents are operating as intended, particularly when they run autonomously for many hours. Opus 5.5 has a classifier that screens every action before it runs, an open-source sandbox that security teams can audit, and code review that catches vulnerabilities before they merge.
The model itself also has stronger defenses. On prompt injection attacks, it matches or beats Opus 5 in every setting we tested, including coding, tool use, computer use, and web browsing. On a benchmark run by the AI security firm Gray Swan, Opus 5.5 ties Fable 5.1 for the lowest prompt injection success rate of any model tested.
Knowledge work
Opus 5.5 is a reliable and adept researcher. In one internal test, we asked Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, and Opus 5 to write a report on a company’s quarterly performance using only the information it could find on a copy of the web where the earnings release was hard to locate. An automated grader checked every figure and quote against sources. Across different effort settings, 16 out of 18 of Opus 5.5’s reports cleared our quality bar, where any invented figure or quote would have failed. Neither Fable 5.1 nor Opus 5 cleared that bar in any attempt.
It’s also strong in financial analysis and business work. Walleye Capital, an investment firm and early tester, reported that Opus 5.5 largely solved their evaluation suite on its lowest setting; on higher settings, it performed even better, noticing an error in their evaluation instructions and correcting for it. No other model had caught this error before.
In another test, we tasked both Opus 5.5 and Opus 5 with analyzing a proposed merger between two fictional HR software companies. Each built a financial model in Excel, then turned it into an executive presentation on whether the deal made sense at its price. Both models reached the same conclusions about the deal, but Opus 5.5’s model was more thorough and its presentation easier to read, while Opus 5’s had minor errors. Opus 5.5 finished in 63 minutes compared to 93 for Opus 5, and cost 50% less to produce.
On knowledge work evaluations, Opus 5.5 outperforms other models while also using fewer tokens. On GDPval-AA v2.1, a test of real-world work across 44 occupations, Opus 5.5 scores 1846 Elo, ahead of Fable 5.1 and Opus 5. At default effort (medium), Opus 5.5 beats GPT-6 Astra at max effort for about a fifth of the cost per task. It likewise outperformed other models on benchmarks measuring business workflows and large-scale data collection.
Artificial Analysis’s GDPval-AA v2.1 evaluates agents on real-world professional work across 44 occupations. At max effort, Opus 5.5 scores 1846 Elo, where Fable 5.1 scores 1735 and Opus 5 scores 1708. At default effort (medium), Opus 5.5 beats GPT-6 Astra at max effort for about a fifth of the cost per task.
AutomationBench, built by Zapier, tests whether an agent can carry out real business workflows across many connected apps. Opus 5.5 outscores Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol at every effort level.
Perplexity’s WANDR benchmark measures agents on large data collection tasks. Opus 5.5 outperforms Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 at a lower cost per task 4 .
4 WANDR: Claude models were run with offline versions of the web search and web fetch tools, programmatic tool calling, code execution, and a 980k-token task budget. This differs from Perplexity’s published setup, scores are not directly comparable across the two and we only show models scored under the same conditions.
Our customers have reported similar results. Here’s what they told us about working with the model:
“Even at its lowest effort setting, Claude Opus 5.5 caught 72% of known bugs in our code reviews to Opus 5’s 56% at high effort, with fewer false alarms and a fraction of the output. On US consulting analysis, low thinking effort matched its higher thinking settings on half the output and passed our quality checks. When more lower thinking efforts are deployed in production, that’s client-ready work delivered efficiently.”
“Financial firms need outputs that are consistently correct. At its lowest effort setting, Claude Opus 5.5 beat Opus 5 at high effort on our BigFinance Bench with about 60% fewer output tokens. Its answers are shorter and better structured, and its slides come out denser, more in line with industry standards.”
“Evaluating new models is central to the multi-model approach behind the LexisNexis Legal Intelligence Engine. In our initial evaluations, Claude Opus 5.5 identified highly relevant citations consistently, demonstrated strength with statutes, and structured its answers around the central legal frameworks and key issues. These are the kinds of capabilities we look for to help our customers accomplish more with Lexis+ with Protégé.”
“In quant research, one wrong assumption can undermine a result. At its lowest effort setting, Claude Opus 5.5 largely solved our evaluation task. At higher settings, it went even further: it detected that the minute indexing in our own instructions was off by one and corrected for it, noting that this would cost it points with the grader. It was right, and no model we’ve tested had caught and acted on that before.”
“As models get better at data work, we’re seeing more convincing-sounding conclusions the data doesn’t support. Claude Opus 5.5 keeps digging past the first plausible answer. One task in our DataBench benchmark asks whether packages were late or tracking was just slow. Opus 5 checked delivery confirmations and called tracking healthy. Opus 5.5 found the packages were late and tracking was broken too. We’re bringing it into the Hex agent for this work.”
“CoCounsel combines multiple models with our content and expertise for complex legal work. With Claude Opus 5.5, we’re seeing better results in our expert evaluations and on our internal benchmarks, alongside gains in speed and token efficiency. We’re excited for customers to experience that difference in the back-and-forth with CoCounsel as a sounding board, weighing evidence and refining their thinking in ways benchmarks don’t fully capture.”
“On end-to-end finance workflows graded against expert rubrics, Claude Opus 5.5 covered 86.6% of what we look for versus 60.3% for Opus 5. On retrieval evals, it achieved our best-ever citation recall with better token efficiency than Opus 5, which keeps our cost per research task in check.”
“Viktor is an AI employee that lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams, so every step he takes shows up in our costs. At the same effort, Claude Opus 5.5 needs fewer steps and tool calls per task than Opus 5 and costs nearly half as much, while getting twice as many of our hardest tasks right.”
Communication
We’ve made major improvements to the way Opus 5.5 writes and communicates, one of the most common areas of feedback we heard about Opus 5. Its messages are much easier to understand at a glance, which testers said helped during long working sessions. It puts the most important information up front, is less likely to use jargon or idiosyncratic phrases, and follows the writing rules you give it. We find that this makes Opus 5.5 a noticeably better collaborator. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two models:
The extra drop isn’t the free tier — it’s a regression in 0552feb (“extract billing period boundaries into periods.py”, labelled “No behaviour change”).
aggregate.monthly_usage used to do a half-open interval:
start, end = month_start(year, month), next_month_start(year, month) if start <= e.ts < end:
if period.contains(e.ts)
@property def last_day(self) -> datetime: return next_month_start(...) - timedelta(days=1) # 2026-08-31 00:00:00 UTC def contains(self, ts): return self.first_day <= ts <= self.last_day
last_day is a datetime at midnight, not a whole day. Subtracting one day from Sep 1 00:00 gives Aug 31 00:00 , and the comparison is inclusive, so the period effectively ends at the first instant of the 31st. Every event timestamped after midnight on the last day of the month is silently dropped — roughly one day of usage per account, per month.
The new test_periods.py doesn’t catch it because it only checks last_day.date() (which is correctly 2026-08-31 ) and tests contains at Aug 1 00:00, Aug 15 12:00, Jul 31 23:59 and Sep 1 00:00 — it never probes anywhere inside the 31st.
The extra drop is a bug in the billing refactor
The free-tier change accounts for only $1.50 of