Claude Opus 5.5
Claude Opus 5.5 is worth evaluating for coding, rag, and agents when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating coding, rag, and agents
- Workloads that can use a 1.05m context window
- Buyers comparing 4 tracked provider routes
Do not use it for
- Workloads where another current model has stronger sourced task evidence
- Family
- Claude 5.5
- Released
- 2026-09-22
- Context
- 1.05m
- Max output
- 128,000
- Architecture
- Decoder Only
- Knowledge cutoff
- 2026-06
- Specialization
- general
- Openness
- Proprietary
- License
- ProprietaryCommercial use: conditional
- Weights
- Not released
- Code
- Unknown
- Training
- Pretrained
Cheapest of 4 routes · Anthropic · cache read $0.200
About
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, first model in the Claude 5.5 family, released September 22, 2026. First-party positioning: long-running agentic coding and knowledge work; performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work; typical workloads about 40% less cost than Opus 5 at default settings (list input/output 20% below Opus 5; cache reads 60% below). Claude API id claude-opus-5-5. List price $4 per 1M input and $20 per 1M output; cache reads $0.20 per 1M tokens (0.05x base input); 5-minute cache writes $5; 1-hour cache writes $8; Batch API 50% off ($2/$10).
Top use-case fit: coding, agents, and build tasks
Coding
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
RAG
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Agents
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare all 4Compare API pricing across 4 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Batch in / out | Cache | Route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | $4.00 | $20.00 | $2.00 / $10.00 | read $0.200 / 5m $5.00 / 1h $8.00 | Serverless |
| AWS Bedrock | $4.00 | $20.00 | - | read $0.200 / 5m $5.00 / 1h $8.00 | Serverless |
| GCP Vertex AI | $4.00 | $20.00 | - | read $0.200 / 5m $5.00 / 1h $8.00 | Serverless |
| Microsoft Foundry | $4.00 | $20.00 | - | read $0.200 / 5m $5.00 / 1h $8.00 | Serverless |
Available via routers & gateways(16)
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
OpenRouter
HybridUnified hybrid gateway to 400+ models from 60+ providers via a single OpenAI-compatible API, with optional auto-routing that selects the best model per prompt.
Portkey
GatewayProduction AI gateway routing to 1,600+ LLMs with failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and guardrails; Apache 2.0 core is fully self-hostable with the complete feature set.
AIRouter
RouterCommercial LLM router that analyzes incoming requests and routes to the optimal model for cost/quality/latency via a drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, with a privacy-preserving embedding mode that avoids sending prompt content.
Amazon Bedrock Intelligent Prompt Routing
RouterAWS Bedrock's native intelligent prompt router that routes prompts between Anthropic Claude model tiers (Haiku/Sonnet) based on predicted task complexity, with no extra per-routing charge.
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Coding
No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
API versions
claude-opus-5-5Claude Opus 5.5Opus 5.5Rankings & picks(2)
Cheapest of 4 routes · Anthropic · cache read $0.200