Claude Opus 5.5 leaks with slashed pricing

Anthropic is preparing to shift the frontier model battlefield from pure benchmark supremacy to brutal cost-to-performance efficiency.

• –Price disruption: Leaked pricing of $4 input and $20 output per million tokens significantly undercuts traditional frontier flagship rates, making Opus-class capability viable for continuous, high-volume agent loops.
• –Frontier parity: Targeting performance on par with next-generation models like GPT-6 Astra indicates that post-training and architectural optimizations have closed the gap between capability scaling and inference overhead.
• –Strategic timing: Stealth testing under "Claude Wafer EAP" signals that Anthropic is accelerating release cycles to preempt competitive flagship updates and keep developer loyalty locked into the Claude ecosystem.