Anthropic Just Droped Opus 4.5 for Claude AI and Claude Code

Why Anthropic Made Their Smartest Model 67% Cheaper (It’s Not Desperation) Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 yesterday. It scored higher than any human candidate ever on their notoriously difficult engineering take-home test. But that’s not the only headline.

The headline: they slashed pricing from $15/$75 to $5/$25 per million tokens. A 67% price drop on their flagship model. Opus now costs less than Sonnet did six months ago.

I’m running Opus 4.5 right now in a multi-tool session with web searches, file operations, and extended context.

What follows: news analysis, real-time observations, and strategic breakdown of what Anthropic is actually doing here.