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Comment by GodelNumbering | Hacker News Reader

Finally that price drop

   Prices per 1M tokens     Claude Opus 5.5    Claude Opus 5
   Cache reads              $0.20              $0.50
   Input tokens             $4                 $5
   Output tokens            $20                $25
   Cache writes             $5                 $6.25

Opus 5 is the model with highest spend on openrouter (https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend) and it seems plausible that Opus 5 is/was the highest spend model in the world, and certainly Anthropic's biggest moneymaker.

If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor

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I disagree - Fable melts the GPUs and they have a high incentive to move people off of that. If they have meaningfully decreased cost to serve on Opus 5.5, they can reduce prices and increase margin or at least turn off the most expensive compute.

It is only a price drop if price * tokens used is less

Happened to be testing a "review patches on a mailing list" harness I was developing; here are a sample of the latest results, testing 12 patches containing a total of 14 issues:

Opus 5.5: Found 8/14 issues. Total cost: $15.40

Fable 5.1: Found 7/14 issues. Total cost: $66.34

Opus 5: Found 6/14 issues. Total cost: $15.19

Sonnet 5: Found 2/14 issues. Total cost: $19.15

This is a relatively small sample size, but it was both the best and the cheapest.

ETA: NB this is "Equivalent API" cost as reported by claude's CLI; I was using my subscription.

Heh I’ve been doing almost the same - back testing against PR comments - and opus 5.5 matched fable 5.1. About $24 for 10 PRs.

I was surprised how much worse Astra did on correctness; I stopped testing with it. Gonna try sol and Luna but low confidence

UPDATE: Sorry, just noticed I typed in the Opus 5 total cost wrong -- it should be $58.19. Main point "best and cheapest" was from the actual numbers, not my typo.

I just told Opus 5.5 "Perform a code review on the current branch" to see what it would come up with. The results were not inspiring. It told me there were five issues, one of which was a test-coverage gap on line 848 of ProjectTemplateTests.cs. But ProjectTemplateTests.cs is only 160 lines long.

I told it that it had made a mistake in the line number, and to double-check all the line numbers. It responded "You were right to push on this: four of the five line numbers were wrong, and while checking them I found two findings that were overstated."

Then I noticed in the corner of the Claude CLI UI that it was showing "Effort: medium". I'm pretty sure I had set it to high effort before; I don't know when it reverted to medium, but that's another thing that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

I'll try again on high effort to see if it does better, but so far I am not impressed with Opus 5.5 on my first day of using it.

My prompts are moving in the other direction as sashiko [1], a managed pipeline developed for the Linux Kernel mailing list like a year ago. But last year's models needed a lot more structure and guidance; the results I posted are from the "single prompt" version of the same thing. The README [2] describes the difference. You can browse the contents to get an idea; basically all the prompts were actually written and iterated by Fable (and now Opus 5.5), seeing how agents failed the tests and improving them.

[1] https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko

[2] https://gitlab.com/xen-project/people/gdunlap/xen-review-pro...

Good data and goes to show that Fable is melting the GPUs and is priced accordingly. I'd guess that cost to serve for Opus 5.5 is meaningfully lower through architecture advances

I doubt your test if you cant even notice that it is not the cheapest with just 4 numbers to compare.

They're claiming a drop in token use too, and that it nets to 40% cheaper.

Unfortunately, they're full of it https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#token-u...

It does work out to be a similar cost per task though

You should probably look at the cost/score graph by effort level instead:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#intelli...

It is most of the pareto frontier.

Not disputing the increase in quality, just stating that non-cherry-picked benchmarks show it is more verbose at Max effort

so don't use it at max? The benchmarks suggest that high/xhigh are more than sufficient to be ahead and a whole magnitude below max with regards to token usage. I'd treat that as an outlier and not how verbose the model is in general (QED I know)

You’re missing my point. I’m saying anthropic are exaggerating their results.

how are they exaggerating the results? Comparing the cost from that chart for 5 and 5.5 for medium-max effort paints a pretty clear picture:

         mean  median
 model
 5      4.135   4.245
 5.5    3.150   2.640

Again seeing how max is a clear outlier, the median cost saving is ~38%, not that far off from the proclaimed 40%.

Is verboseness the only measure of token efficiency towards overall task completion?

5.5 is higher for max effort, slightly higher for xhigh and lower for high, medium and low effort.

The biggest proportional difference seems to be at max (5.5 is 38% more) and at high (5.5 is 21% less).

I think most people run at high and xhigh. At xhigh it is close enough to be task dependent and I don't think most people will notice. At high effort I think it looks like it will be an improvement for most people.

5.5 Max should probably be compared to Fable - it performs a lot better than 5 Max.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...

I don't think so, I typically use Opus 5 on High, and 5.5 scores lower on token use:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...

I tested it with Claude Code, and I can confirm it's way cheaper, better, faster and less verbose than Opus 5.

parent means that they could get more client / a larger part of the market, which would lead to more income (more tokens) despite lower marginal prices

Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.

Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.

Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.

So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.

Competition works.

People are paying for Opus 5? Not just burning down tokens left after they enjoyed Fable on the sub? Amazing.

My workplace doesn't even offer Fable. And on the sub, I've had a hard time understanding Opus 5, but Fable can deal with it with subagents.

If 5.5 is any better, I might try to do agentic-assisted development instead of just telling fable to delegate

Telling Fable to delegate is agentic development. At least I thought so until reading your comment.

When you need to disable data retention, you cannot use subscription plans.

Fable tends not to perform better, just cost more.

> Fable tends not to perform better, just cost more.

There are old wives' tales on how the original Fable was superb and the stuff of legend,but it as it was leaps and bounds beyond what other models were being offered then Anthropic opted replace it with a neutered version under the same name.

So today everyone can pay to use Fable, but legend has it they are paying for a nerfed replacement released under the same name.

Enterprise and most Team accounts use API pricing, they don't have an included-usage quota.

We can’t use fable at work, opus and Astra are as good as it gets.

Enterprise, and APIs

All the anti-AI people constantly say that any moment now the prices will skyrocket and in the end human work will be cheaper compared to using AI.

It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.

It's the Chinese open source models. They're barely behind the frontier, making AI a commodity, forcing openAI and Anthropic's margins downward.

I'm hardly a fan of China/Xi, but I do appreciate and benefit from this.

China doesn't care about money. Imagine a world where it's globally normalized to ask a Chinese LLM who to vote for, what happened in Hongkong, about the Uigurs, or if Taiwan is a country.

They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.

FYI the United States do not recognize Taiwan as a country.

There's only 12 countries that do on the planet, the most "relevant" of them being Guatemala and Haiti.

As or the LLM topic: you can download weights of chinese models and remove any censorship and bias. Can you do so with american closed ones?

> FYI the United States do not recognize Taiwan as a country.

For political reason, yes. Taiwan is obviously a country, though.

This is one explanation. However, if Xi Jinping believes that whoever reaches superintelligence first becomes the next global hegemon, doing this (and more, cough cough Taiwan) suddenly looks very sane solely as a way to kneecap the competition.

The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate any damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.

The service is the value, not the model unto itself. This is where nearly all of HN is somehow entirely blind.

Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.

China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.

It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.

Search is different as a service provided for free. When cost isn't in the picture, trust/convenience win.

But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.

These companies are posting massive losses while also lowering prices. This sounds just like the Chinese bikeshare bubble where they were all taking massive losses in hopes that their competitor would go broke first.

In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.

If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU

Anthropic is heading toward $100 billion in annual sales, at the fastest pace of any company in world history. There isn't a close second.

The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.

> Anthropic is heading toward $100 billion in annual sales, at the fastest pace of any company in world history. There isn't a close second.

"Allegedly".

Plus with a lot of accounting tricks, and this not being recurring to make their books look nice for the eventual IPO.

https://isaiprofitable.com/

The bike landfills from the bikeshare bubble are terrible, but I am not looking forward to the pelican landfills from the AI bubble.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if this was a conspiracy to crash the "west" AI labs. Might as well pop the AI bubble and see the USA economy go down the drain. Even if not orchestrated, I am sure they see how they could benefit from that outcome.

Now, all this talk of pacing the frontier obviously means that they are afraid of the competition. It could be the open models eating their margins, but also competing frontier models forcing them to invest more and more for diminishing returns, just to keep up. They would certainly benefit from a "Moore's Law" roadmap to pace the advances, and seeing that they lobby for US laws, it would probably mean they are more worried about increasing spending. Though outlawing both open models and Chinese models would be good for their bottom line as well.

You have no suspicion that this most recent collusion is in part to setup the conditions to guarantee government subsidies/bailouts?

There's zero chance of that ever happening. Pure delusion.

We haven’t been able to use opus as much as we’d want because it’s been too expensive for general use, price drop is good so I can stop juggling different models and just use this daily unless it has some weird new issues

Speaking for myself, I have not been able to use Opus as much as I’d want because its verbose prose makes human reviews of its assumptions, architecture proposals etc. more painful than its predecessors. If they’ve solved that, I’ll be accelerating through my backlog that much faster, and using tokens accordingly.

Footnote on their pricing page says:

> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.

If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.

Since something like 98% of tokens are cache hits, that's a pretty substantial drop from 0.1x

Not necessarily, if Haiku performs better than Luna.

6-Luna dropped it to 1c since you wrote this! :D

Price per task (not per token) is what really matters.

Agree. But similar to how ISP use 200 mbps (bits) instead of 25 MBPS(bytes), i think this trend isn't going away.

That analogy doesn't hold; at least w bits vs bytes it's still "data over time".

In this case it's measuring something nearly meaningless. You could charge 100 times less per token, but if task completion takes 1,000 times as many tokens, it's not much of a bargain.

60% cache read is cool, but subscription only get 25% more according to Cat. I'm confused

I think gpt 5.6 family also dropped pricing but didn't give any more usage for the subscriptions. Maybe it's a way to silently lower the value given to subscriptions while keeping API pricing competitive

25% more usage sounds about right given the other token costs are down about 20%? I don't think cache read is a big portion of the overall cost.

Anything with long context quickly gets dominated by cache reads. Especially for interactive sessions I’ve got cache read % between 95% and 98%.

In my mix it's usually 98% or 99% at which point Fable 5.1 was pretty close to the same cost as Opus 5 due to the cheaper cached read. I've seen similar numbers for other people with long-running tasks running experiment loops and than sort of thing.

> I don't think cache read is a big portion of the overall cost.

For long running tasks it is. That's what made Deepseek so cheap.

Yeah, flash models, DeepSeek, MiMo, GLM, I love those things. For simple tasks like a daily routine shit, just setting up stuff and then doing the hard stuff in Claude/Codex, that's a reasonable approach for someone like me, a "gentleman code farmer", lol. And even lower tier stuff, I have the local models taking care of. Now that Jev is out I can finally have a true AI sysadmins managing my "cloud in the basement" homelab at the cost of electricity, which is not cheap btw

source link please?

>and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too

have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.

This is good. Probably to match GPT pricing, though frontier Claude models are still not as token efficient.

Opus 5.5 seems to consume quota a lot slower also.

"Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that."

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