Anthropic and OpenAI debuted more affordable versions of their frontier models as they battle for wallet share from increasingly cost-conscious businesses, and face growing competition from lower cost open weight models. The releases came within hours of each other, a sign of the labs’ heated rivalry, despite both companies’ recent calls for an AI slowdown.
Anthropic debuted Claude Opus 5.5, which it says performs at the level of its flagship Fable 5.1 model but costs around 40% less to run than Opus 5, which came out in July. It’s the first release in a new family of models, with Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 expected “over the coming weeks,” Anthropic said.
