Why Claude Opus 5.5's cost per task barely moved despite price cuts
- Source
- Artificial Analysis
- Date
When Opus 5.5 launched, the story was lower list prices. Artificial Analysis has now measured what those prices mean per task. On its Intelligence Index, a 20% token price cut and cheaper cache reads nearly offset an increase of about 80% in tokens used per task, leaving cost per task close to Opus 5. On its Coding Agent Index the picture is sharper: Opus 5.5 set a new high score of 66, with gains on Terminal-Bench, DeepSWE and SWE-Atlas-QnA, but cost per task rose 21% to $13.04, driven by roughly 2.4 times more output tokens. The practical lesson is that price sheets are a poor guide to spend on reasoning models. Teams planning a switch should measure tokens per completed task on their own workloads before assuming the upgrade saves money.
Claude Opus 5.5 (max) costs $5.98 per Intelligence Index task, which is similar to Opus 5 (max) at $5.86, but this bundles a significant token usage increase with Anthropic’s price reductions Compared to Opus 5, Opus 5.5’s increased token usage would drive an ~80% increase in cost per task to $10.51. However, the 20% cut to base prices takes that to $8.41, and then cutting cache reads further to $0.20 takes it to $5.98 (an additional 29% cut)
For more analysis of the Opus 5.5 release see https://t.co/dIBD9GMiu0
Context
Artificial Analysis reports that Claude Opus 5.5 (max) costs $5.98 per Intelligence Index task, similar to Opus 5 (max) at $5.86, even though Anthropic cut prices. The firm says the figure bundles a significant increase in usage with the price reductions. By its arithmetic, the extra token usage alone would raise cost per task about 80% to $10.51. A 20% cut to base prices brings that to $8.41, and cutting cache reads to $0.20 brings it to $5.98. On this accounting the price cuts offset the added token usage, leaving cost near where Opus 5 started.
- token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
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