Claude Opus 5.5 cuts costs 40%, matches frontier performance

Summary

Token economics shift materially for production workloads: cache reads drop from $0.50 to $0.20 per million tokens (60% reduction), directly lowering per-task costs for retrieval-heavy and agentic patterns. This enables broader adoption of long-context reasoning without proportional budget scaling.

Why it matters

Token economics shift materially for production workloads: cache reads drop from $0.50 to $0.20 per million tokens (60% reduction), directly lowering per-task costs for retrieval-heavy and agentic patterns. This enables broader adoption of long-context reasoning without proportional budget scaling.

Sources

1. 1.costs 40% less to run than Opus 5
2. 2.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
3. 3.Opus 5.5 also generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5
4. 4.It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work
5. 5.One tester completed a 680,000-line code migration in less than a day