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News · Anthropic · 2 min read

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Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5 at $4/$20 per million tokens and raises five-hour limits

On September 22, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, and raised five-hour usage limits on subscription plans.

Archive entry: this covers an event from September 22, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On September 22, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5), the first model in the Claude 5.5 family, aimed at long-running agentic coding and knowledge work.

What changed with Claude Opus 5.5

  • Prices were $4 per million input tokens, $20 per million output tokens, $0.20 for cache reads and $5 for cache writes, against $5, $25, $0.50 and $6.25 for Claude Opus 5.
  • The context window was 1M tokens by default, with 128k max output tokens and always-on adaptive thinking.
  • Anthropic said typical default-setting workloads ran 40% cheaper than on Opus 5 and output was generated more than 30% faster. The Claude Help Center release notes said Opus 5.5 performed at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work.
  • Fast mode gave up to 2.5x speed at $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens. It launched as a research preview on the Claude API and also ran in Claude Code.
  • Anthropic raised five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, and gave subscription users a rate limit reset that they could save and use when they chose.
  • In Claude Code v2.1.280, Opus 5.5 became the default Opus model.

What it means for people who build with AI

Users got a cheaper Opus, but code that forced tool use or turned thinking off had to be updated. Setting thinking to type disabled or enabled, or using tool_choice types any or tool, returned a 400 error, and thinking depth was set with the effort parameter. Computer use on the Claude API and Google Cloud required the computer_toolset_20260801 toolset, and computer_20251124 returned a 400 error there, while it kept working on Amazon Bedrock.

Availability and benchmarks

Opus 5.5 was available on the Claude API, Claude in Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Claude Models on Google Cloud (Google managed) and Claude in Microsoft Foundry. Anthropic's materials listed 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Fable 5.1: 55.8%, Opus 5: 52.3%), 57.8% on CursorBench 4.0 (Opus 5: 46.6%) and 81.8% on OSWorld 2.1 (Opus 5: 74.0%).

Sources

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5 at $4/$20 per million tokens and raises five-hour limits | vibecoding.inc