Claude Opus 5.5: What Anthropic Actually Shipped

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026, and the reception was loud. In this Model Spotlight episode, we profile what the lab actually shipped: a cheaper price across every line than Opus 5, a hard change that means thinking mode can no longer be switched off, and a model card that conspicuously omits parameter count, architecture, and context window. We walk through the benchmark table, the independent verification from Artificial Analysis, the pricing snapshot as of mid-October, and the anti-distillation safeguard Anthropic calls preserved thinking. If you're doing capacity planning on a frontier model, the gaps in this card matter as much as the numbers.

Episode 6034 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6034 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/321817)