The Claude Opus family
Opus is Claude upper tier, and until a few days ago the odd thing about it was that the price had not moved at all from 4.5 through 5. Opus 5.5 broke that pattern on 22 September 2026: the price fell. The version to use today is this one.
- the price finally dropped
- 1M token context window
- Claude upper tier
Last checked: This is a reference page. It is re-checked against the vendor sources and updated when a new version ships. What changed
Which version to use
Opus 5.5. The only reason to stay on an older version is a service whose behaviour you have tested and do not want disturbed. On unit cost there is no reason left at all: the new version is both cheaper and, by Anthropic own benchmarks, stronger.
A pattern that held for six versions, then broke
On this line Anthropic had held the price flat from 4.5 through 5 while raising capability: six straight versions, all $5 and $25. Opus 5.5 is the first to break that pattern, at $4 in and $20 out, forty percent cheaper by Anthropic own account.
One older exception still stands: from 4.7 onward the tokenizer changed, and the same text produces roughly 30 percent more tokens. So even at 5.5 lower sticker price, the real invoice needs measuring separately rather than read straight off the price table.
Release timeline
Each version with its own release date, and what changed against the one before it.
- Claude Opus 5.5 current The price that held flat across five straight versions finally moved, and the biggest jump sits exactly in long agentic work.
- Claude Opus 5 legacy Half the price of Fable 5 with close to its coding performance, and the latest knowledge cutoff of any Anthropic model.
- Claude Opus 4.1 retired
- Claude Opus 4.5 legacy
- Claude Opus 4.6 legacy
- Claude Opus 4.7 legacy
- Claude Opus 4.8 legacy
Where it falls short
- Six versions held one price and that built an expectation; anyone who had priced a service around it should know it is no longer the rule.
- The tokenizer changed at 4.7, so real token consumption runs above the number on paper.
- Older versions in this family are still available, which is exactly how a team ends up sitting on a stale one.
- No version in this family has an official route from Iran.
Our take
If you run a service on this family, move to Opus 5.5 sooner rather than later, because the unit cost of doing so is not zero, it is negative. Just test the new version behaviour separately, since its default effort differs from the last one.