Anthropic has maintained or lowered output token pricing across recent Opus releases, with Claude Opus 5 launching July 24, 2026, at the unchanged $25 per million rate of its predecessor before Opus 5.5 debuted September 22 at $20 per million—20% below Opus 5—while delivering near-Fable 5.1 performance on coding and agentic benchmarks. This pattern reflects competitive pressure from OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 variants and Anthropic’s focus on cost-effective frontier large language models for software engineering and long-context tasks. Traders watch for whether a 5.6+ model continues the downward trend in output pricing or introduces new tiers amid rapid iteration cycles and platform availability on Bedrock, Azure, and Google Cloud.