Long, hard jobs like migrating a system, speeding up a slow website or writing a complex report eat the most hours, and they're where cheap AI gets things wrong most often. Opus 5.5 is Anthropic's new model for that kind of work. Its page says it matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5.
Who this is NOT for
If you need to answer FAQs or sort WhatsApp messages at volume, the biggest model is overspending: Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 arrive 'in the coming weeks', and they're worth waiting for. If your data can't leave your office, this model runs in Anthropic's cloud, so look at Ollama instead. And if you mainly want it to automate business workflows, note that in its own page's table GPT-6 Astra scores 41.4% on AutomationBench and Opus 5.5 scores 40.0%.
The most honest line on the page comes from Anthropic itself: at this level, benchmark gaps no longer predict real-world use very well, and the distance from Fable 5.1 is smaller than the numbers suggest. For a small business, the news isn't a tenth of a point on a chart. It's the price. Cache reads are down 60%, and Anthropic says they make up most of the cost of agent and coding work. The usual mistake is using the most expensive model for everything. Save it for long, messy jobs, and note another improvement they claim: it writes more clearly and leads with what matters, so checking its work takes less time. The page says nothing about a license or open source: it's a closed Anthropic service.
Your first step
Open anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5, click 'Try Claude' and give it a real job that takes you an afternoon today, like turning your messy project notes into a report for your partner. Then check whether it put the important parts first, as promised.
The Claude Opus 5.5 implementation guide
The project belongs to www.anthropic.com and it is free: the link beside asks for nothing. The guide to set it up without getting lost is ours: step by step, common mistakes and a checklist. Leave your email and we will send it.
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