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Claude Opus 4.5 launched on November 24, 2025, with Anthropic reporting an 80.9% result on SWE-bench Verified and launch API pricing of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Compared with the earlier $15/$75 Opus rates, that was a roughly two-thirds reduction—but it did not make every Claude product or coding workflow 66% cheaper.
As of August 18, 2026, Opus 4.5 is a previous-generation model rather than Anthropic’s automatically current flagship. Its launch benchmark and pricing claims remain significant, but developers should verify current availability, pricing, and retirement notices before using it in a new production integration.
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The short answer
- Launch: November 24, 2025.
- API model ID:
claude-opus-4-5-20251101. - Headline benchmark: Anthropic reported 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified, averaged across five trials with extended thinking disabled.
- Launch API price: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
- Price reduction: Approximately 66.7% versus the earlier $15/$75 Opus pricing.
- Current perspective: It was a leading coding model at launch, but it should not automatically be described as the latest or best Claude model in 2026.
The important distinction is between a strong, vendor-reported coding benchmark and reliable production software engineering. Opus 4.5 may be attractive for validated legacy integrations or demanding coding agents, but new projects should compare it with currently supported Claude models and competing tools.
What Anthropic launched
Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4.5 on November 24, 2025, positioning it as a flagship model for coding, autonomous agents, computer use, research, slides, spreadsheets, and other multi-step workflows. The launch announcement is available on Anthropic’s website.
At launch, users could access Opus 4.5 through Claude consumer and team applications, the Anthropic API, and major cloud channels including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft’s cloud AI platform. Anthropic also announced related updates involving the Claude Developer Platform, Claude Code, consumer applications, Claude in Excel and Chrome-related workflows, effort control, context compaction, advanced tool use, and memory.
The API identifier announced for the model was:
claude-opus-4-5-20251101That identifier identifies the launch-era model. It should not be treated as a guarantee that every current Anthropic endpoint or cloud marketplace still accepts it.
What the 80.9% SWE-bench score actually measures
SWE-bench Verified is a software-engineering benchmark, not a general intelligence score and not a measure of how much work a model can perform across every production codebase.
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The benchmark uses 500 human-verified problems drawn from open-source repositories. In a typical evaluation, an agent receives an issue and repository context, modifies the code, and is judged by whether the relevant tests pass. The result therefore reflects the model together with the evaluation harness, tools, prompts, context, test execution, and retry policy.
Anthropic’s system card reports an 80.9% SWE-bench Verified result without extended thinking, averaged over five trials. That is the source of the widely repeated headline figure. The same evaluation reported 80.6% with a 64,000-token thinking configuration.
Those numbers are not contradictory. They represent different configurations, and the inference budget should appear beside the score whenever the results are compared.
Anthropic’s reported benchmark results
| Evaluation | Result | Configuration |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.9% | Extended thinking disabled |
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.6% | 64,000-token thinking configuration |
| SWE-bench Pro | 52.0% | Extended thinking disabled |
| SWE-bench Pro | 51.6% | 64,000-token thinking configuration |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 76.2% | Anthropic system-card evaluation |
These figures come from Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 system card. SWE-bench Pro is a different and more difficult benchmark, so its lower result should not be presented as a contradiction or casually combined with SWE-bench Verified.
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At launch, secondary coverage reported Opus 4.5 ahead of contemporary figures associated with models such as GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Gemini 3 Pro. The relevant conclusion is narrower than “Opus 4.5 was best at coding in every situation.” Anthropic reported an 80.9% SWE-bench Verified result, placing it ahead of the contemporary scores cited at launch.
Cross-model comparisons are sensitive to:
- Benchmark version and task selection.
- Agent scaffolding and available tools.
- Prompt and repository context.
- Inference or thinking budget.
- Number of attempts and retry rules.
- Whether the result was vendor-reported or independently reproduced.
For launch-era context, see Ars Technica’s coverage. The scores should not be treated as a universal 2026 leaderboard or as directly interchangeable measurements.
How the 66% price reduction was calculated
Anthropic priced Opus 4.5 at launch at:
Input: $5 per million tokens
Output: $25 per million tokensThe comparison was the earlier Opus rate of approximately $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens:
| Pricing | Input | Output | Combined cost for 1M input + 1M output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earlier Opus rate | $15 | $75 | $90 |
| Opus 4.5 launch rate | $5 | $25 | $30 |
Each rate fell by two-thirds:
- Input: $15 to $5, a 66.7% reduction.
- Output: $75 to $25, a 66.7% reduction.
- Combined example: $90 to $30, also a 66.7% reduction.
That is why “roughly 66% cheaper” is mathematically reasonable. It is not a claim that every Claude subscription, cloud bill, Claude Code session, or complete coding project became 66% cheaper.
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Actual costs depend on the workload and access channel. Relevant variables include:
- The balance between input and output tokens.
- Prompt caching and cached-token rates.
- Batch processing.
- Tool calls and long tool results.
- Long-context sessions.
- Agent retries, parallel subagents, and test logs.
- Cloud-provider pricing, discounts, quotas, and regional terms.
- Subscription fees or organization-level arrangements.
Before budgeting, check the applicable rates in Anthropic’s current API pricing documentation. Cloud marketplaces may apply different commercial terms.
API pricing is not consumer-plan pricing
API pricing is metered by tokens and features. Consumer Claude plans are subscription products with their own usage limits, model access, and rate limits. A person using Claude through the web or desktop application is therefore not necessarily paying the $5/$25 API rates.
Claude Code also needs separate treatment. Its total cost can depend on the associated plan, API arrangement, model choice, context length, organization billing, and the number of agent actions. The model’s per-token rate is only one part of the cost of a complete coding workflow.
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Similarly, availability through AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Foundry can vary by region, account, quota, rollout status, and marketplace terms. Launch availability is not a permanent promise of current availability.
What else Anthropic claimed improved
Anthropic’s launch materials described improvements beyond the headline benchmark. They included:
- Leadership on seven of eight programming languages in its SWE-bench Multilingual evaluation.
- A reported 10.6% improvement over Sonnet 4.5 on Aider Polyglot.
- Gains on BrowseComp-Plus and Vending-Bench.
- Lower token usage than predecessors for comparable or better outcomes.
- Improved long-running agents, context management, tool use, and multi-agent coordination.
Anthropic also said that, at medium effort, Opus 4.5 matched Sonnet 4.5’s best SWE-bench Verified result while using 76% fewer output tokens. At maximum effort, Anthropic said it exceeded Sonnet 4.5 by 4.3 percentage points while using 48% fewer output tokens.
These are company-reported launch claims, not universal independently established guarantees. They are useful for understanding Anthropic’s intended positioning, but teams should validate the claims against their own repositories and agent setup.
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Opus 4.5’s effort control was intended to let developers choose how much computation a task receives. Lower effort can reduce latency, output tokens, and spending. Higher effort can help on difficult tasks but may consume more time and tokens.
A practical deployment might use lower effort for routine code edits and escalate difficult debugging, architectural changes, or multi-step repository work to a higher setting. Results from different effort levels should not be compared as if they were the same inference configuration.
Because API syntax and supported settings can change, developers should use the versioned documentation for the endpoint they are integrating rather than copying an old example.
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An 80.9% benchmark pass rate does not establish that Opus 4.5:
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- Makes sound architectural decisions without supervision.
- Performs dependable security reviews.
- Handles ambiguous requirements as well as an experienced engineer.
- Produces safe database migrations or deployment changes by default.
- Has low hallucination or regression rates in every workflow.
- Replaces human code review, testing, or ownership.
SWE-bench-style results can also be influenced by training-data exposure, repository popularity, issue clarity, test-suite quality, agent scaffolding, patch selection, and retries. Passing the benchmark is narrower than taking a production task from specification through deployment and maintenance.
The right production metric is usually not cost per million tokens or benchmark score alone. Measure cost per accepted change, including failed attempts, tool calls, tests, human review, corrections, and rollback risk.
Should you use Opus 4.5 in 2026?
Opus 4.5 may still make sense when:
- An existing application has been validated against its exact behavior.
- Reproducibility with the November 2025 model matters.
- A legacy integration specifically requires
claude-opus-4-5-20251101. - The workload benefits from strong coding and agentic performance but does not need newer model capabilities.
- You have confirmed current availability in the selected API or cloud marketplace.
A newer Claude model is usually the better starting point when:
- You are building a new production integration.
- You need current support, longer context, improved latency, or newer tool features.
- A newer model offers better cost-performance.
- Your workflow depends on current Claude Code or platform functionality.
- Model-retirement risk is unacceptable.
Sonnet or a smaller model may be better when:
- Most work involves routine edits, summaries, classification, or straightforward code.
- Latency and volume matter more than peak benchmark performance.
- You can route easy tasks to a cheaper model and escalate difficult tasks to an Opus-class model.
- Retries and agent overhead make Opus 4.5 expensive despite its lower token rates.
Consider other providers when:
- Your organization is committed to a different cloud ecosystem.
- Data residency, procurement, or governance requirements favor another vendor.
- You need open-weight deployment or self-hosting.
- Your team’s coding workflow is optimized for a competing agent.
- Independent reproduction matters more than vendor-reported results.
Before integrating: an availability and cost checklist
- Confirm the model ID: Check whether the target endpoint still accepts
claude-opus-4-5-20251101. - Check availability: Verify the provider, region, account, quota, and deployment catalog.
- Check current rates: Confirm input, output, cached, batch, and tool-related pricing.
- Separate product costs: Do not combine API billing with consumer subscriptions or Claude Code economics.
- Set usage controls: Budget for retries, long contexts, test output, and parallel agents.
- Pin deliberately: Pin a model for reproducibility, but monitor retirement and migration notices.
- Run a representative pilot: Test proprietary repositories and measure accepted changes, review time, regressions, latency, and total cost.
- Review data terms: Confirm security, retention, governance, and enterprise requirements for the chosen access channel.
Final verdict
Claude Opus 4.5 was an important November 2025 launch because Anthropic paired a leading reported coding benchmark with a substantial reduction in flagship API rates. The 80.9% figure is real as an Anthropic-reported SWE-bench Verified result, but it is not a general software-engineering score and should be read alongside its no-thinking configuration, five-trial average, and benchmark limitations.
The “66% price drop” is also real in the narrow comparison that matters: $15/$75 fell to $5/$25, reducing both token rates by 66.7%. It does not describe every Claude plan, cloud marketplace, or complete agent workflow.
In 2026, the strongest case for Opus 4.5 is an existing, validated integration or a workload where its known behavior remains valuable. For a new project, compare current Claude models and alternatives first, and make the decision using production cost per accepted change rather than a launch-era benchmark or headline token price alone.
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