AI Coding

💡 TL;DR / Summary — Claude Opus 5.5 Pricing (BLUF) Question: Is Claude Opus 5.5 actually cheaper than Opus 5, now that its thinking can’t be switched off? Measurement: From Anthropic’s official price list, the same token counts cost 20% to 35.5% less on Opus 5.5 across three workload shapes. The saving is larger when more of the input is cached. Catch: Thinking is billed as output. If Opus 5.5 produces more than +41.7% output for an uncached request (+32.3% for a cached session), it costs more than Opus 5. Rule: Switch cache-heavy agent work first; measure thinking_tokens before moving workloads that ran Opus 5 with thinking off. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, 20% below Opus 5, with cache reads cut 60% to $0.20. The announcement also states that Opus 5.5 “is also no longer available with ’thinking’ mode switched off.” ...

💡 TL;DR / Summary (BLUF) What happened: On June 12, 2026, a US export-control directive forced Anthropic to suspend Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Unable to separate users by nationality in real time, Anthropic disabled both models for every customer worldwide. Resolution: The Department of Commerce lifted the controls on June 30, and Anthropic restored Fable 5 on July 1, 19 days after the suspension. Mythos 5 came back only for a set of approved US organizations. What to use now (September 2026): Fable 5.1 (shipped September 1, $10/$50 per million tokens) for the hardest work, or Opus 5.5 ($4/$20) as the cheaper heavy-coding default. Leaving your model on default is still the safest setting. “The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.” — Anthropic, official statement, June 12, 2026 ...