Anthropic’s rapid Opus cadence—Opus 5 in July at $25 per million output tokens followed by Opus 5.5 on September 22 at $20—has shaped expectations for 5.6+. The latest model delivers Fable 5.1-level performance on coding and agentic tasks at 20% lower cost and 40% less per typical workload, with cache reads cut to $0.20, reflecting efficiency gains amid competitive pressure from OpenAI and others. Traders are watching for whether the next Opus iteration maintains or accelerates this price-reduction trend, especially as Sonnet 5.5 just launched and further 5.5-family updates are imminent. Historical two-month gaps between Opus releases and Anthropic’s emphasis on cost-per-task improvements suggest any 5.6 debut could quickly reset output pricing again.