Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in its new Claude 5.5 family.
The interesting part isn't simply that there's a new Claude model.
It's that Anthropic is putting a major emphasis on agentic coding, long-running development tasks, and token efficiency.
According to Anthropic, Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads and generates output more than 30% faster. API pricing is $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.
What's new for developers?
Opus 5.5 is designed for tasks such as:
Large codebase migrations
Debugging and refactoring
Code reviews
Multi-step terminal tasks
Long-running AI agent workflows
Complex software development
Research and knowledge-work tasks
Anthropic also reports improvements in agentic coding benchmarks and says the model can complete some large software tasks with significantly fewer tokens and steps than Opus 5.
The cost change matters
For developers experimenting with autonomous coding agents, token usage can become a major part of the operating cost.
Opus 5.5's pricing is:
Input: $4 / million tokens
Output: $20 / million tokens
Cache reads: $0.20 / million tokens
Anthropic says this combination of lower token pricing and lower token usage can reduce typical workload costs substantially compared with Opus 5.
What about safety?
Anthropic also says Opus 5.5 launched with stronger safeguards covering areas including cybersecurity, biology and anti-distillation measures. The company says the model was externally evaluated before release.
The bigger question for developers is now:
Does Opus 5.5 make AI coding agents practical for larger, longer-running software projects?
I broke down the new model, pricing, coding improvements,
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