Claude Opus 5.5 Tops Independent Benchmark at 40% Lower Price

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 this week, its new flagship model, priced roughly 40% below its predecessor and landing just 90 minutes before OpenAI's competing release.

Key points:

• Opus 5.5 is priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, with prompt cache reads dropping to $0.20 per million tokens — a meaningful cost reduction for high-volume users.

• The model is generally available across the Claude API, Claude Code, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry — a wide simultaneous rollout across competitors' own cloud platforms.

• Independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis placed Opus 5.5 at the top of its Intelligence Index, roughly five points ahead of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra.

• This is one of the few capability claims this week backed by a third-party evaluator rather than the lab's own marketing.

Why It Matters: A meaningful price cut paired with a top independent benchmark score, released the same week a direct competitor did the same thing, is the clearest sign yet that frontier AI has moved from a capability race into a genuine price-and-capability race.