AI Pricing — Fable-Level Power at 60% Less, Weeks Before Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO

On Tuesday Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. By the company's own benchmark table it matches or beats Claude Fable 5.1 — its flagship until this week — on most tasks. Fable 5.1 costs $10 and $50. The same work, on the maker's numbers, now costs 60% less. On the same day the market sold Adobe, Intuit, Visa, Mastercard and the big banks and bought SanDisk and Micron. Both are the same story: a unit of machine intelligence keeps getting cheaper, and the market is sorting companies by whether that is their input or their competitor.

The price

Four models, one maker, list prices per million tokens. The 40% figure in much of Tuesday's coverage compares Opus 5.5 with its predecessor Opus 5 at default settings, where the new model also uses fewer tokens per task; the per-token list price against Opus 5 is 20% lower. Against Fable 5.1, the model it is said to match, the list price is 60% lower on both input and output.

Model	Input $/M	Output $/M	vs Fable 5.1
Claude Fable 5.1	10.00	50.00	—
Claude Opus 5	5.00	25.00	-50%
Claude Opus 5.5	4.00	20.00	-60%
Claude Sonnet 5	2.00	10.00	-80%

On Terminal-Bench 4.0, a test of agents working in a command line, Anthropic's table puts Opus 5.5 at 66.4% against 55.8% for Fable 5.1, 52.3% for Opus 5 and 57.9% for OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra; on SWE-bench Pro, a coding test, at 89.9%. These are the maker's own numbers and have not been independently reproduced. Opus 5.5 arrived less than two months after Opus 5. Prompt-cache reads, the price of re-reading a long document, fell 60% to $0.20 per million.