// ZDNET — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Claude Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance – and costs 40% less
Anthropic’s newest Claude model aims to make frontier AI cheaper, faster, and safer, while giving subscribers more breathing room before those frustrating usage limits kick in.
Less than two months after the release of Claude Opus 5, Anthropic is back with Opus 5.5. The big pitch for Opus 5 was that it had “near Fable” performance at half the price. This time, the headline is that the workhorse AI Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance for most work and costs about 40% less to run.
“Our customers use Box AI on enormous amounts of content, so speed and cost are a top priority,” Yashodha Bhavnani, VP of AI Products at Box, reports. “In our evaluations, Claude Opus 5.5 used a third of the tokens Opus 5 did, and its answers were 40% less verbose without losing accuracy. We expect that to matter a lot for teams running agents across their content in areas like financial services and the public sector.”
Anthropic says that, “Over the coming weeks, we’ll also be launching Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5.” Opus 5.5 is available today.
I’ve been using the heck out of Claude Code with Opus 5, so I’m particularly hopeful that the company’s performance claims are accurate. The company says it “generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5.”
Also: Anthropic merges Claude chat and Cowork into one
Token prices and subscription plans are addressed in today’s announcement. Tokens are priced at 20% less than when used with Opus 5. Opus 5.5 also reportedly “needs fewer tokens for higher quality work.”
For subscription users like me, Anthropic is raising its five-hour usage limits by 20%. That’s basically a 20% bigger gas tank for how much AI chomping you can use during five hours. While my Max plan doesn’t get reset often, it does get reset. For those on $20/month plans, this could be a considerable win. On top of that, the company says that both 5-hour and weekly usage limits go further because Opus 5.5 costs less than Opus 5.
These seem to be additive. There’s a 20% larger bucket coupled with a 25% slower burn, meaning that effective usage seems to be about a 50% greater run capacity with Opus 5.5. That’s not an inconsiderable quality-of-life improvement.
Anthropic also says that Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally than prior models. If it’s even just a little less obsequious, I’d be happy. Sometimes, Opus can be a total suck-up, particularly when it’s done something wrong.