Artificial Analysis finds Opus 5.5 at max effort costs about the same per task as Opus 5 because it uses more tokens
Latent Space (AINews)·high signal
Latent Space's AINews reports Artificial Analysis measuring Opus 5.5 (max) at $5.98 per Intelligence Index task against $5.86 for Opus 5 (max), because higher token usage cancels out the per-token price cut. AINews also switched its own newsletter generation to Opus 5.5 after a side-by-side with GPT-6 Sol, pointing to Anthropic's writing improvements, and flagged that the Opus 5.5 system card reports multi-agent scaling up to 100 parallel agents. The 40% saving Anthropic advertises applies at default settings. At max effort the bill stays about the same.