Claude Opus 5.5 is the new Quality default

Claude Opus 5.5 is now the default model on the Quality tier. It is Anthropic's newest Opus, it keeps the 1M-token context window and the 128K maximum answer length of Claude Opus 5, and it costs less per token: $4 in / $20 out per million against Opus 5's $5 / $25, with re-read context dropping from $0.50 to $0.20 per million.

One thing to know about credits. Opus 5.5 thinks for longer before it answers. On our own benchmark it spends roughly 1.8 times as many tokens working through the same task, which more than cancels out the lower price per token - so a typical job costs somewhat more, not less. We chose it as the default anyway, because the work it returns is better.

Claude Opus 5 is still one click away in the model picker, and it is the cheaper of the two per answer. If you would rather trade some quality for a smaller bill, pick it - and anything you have already pinned to it stays exactly as it is.