Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5 for longer, context-heavy coding sessions

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which it estimates costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 for typical token-billed workloads. Input and output token prices were cut 20% and cached token reads 60%, and the company says Opus 5.5 generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5. Anthropic also published Claude Code usage data from March to September 2026 showing context per request grew 2.6x, Claude works 3.3x longer per prompt with over 40% more model calls, and cache-missing input fell by more than 50%.