Anthropic launches Opus 5.5, its first model since CEO Amodei called for AI slowdown

Anthropic ( ANTH.PVT ) on Tuesday debuted its latest high-powered AI model, Opus 5.5, the company's first in its Claude 5.5 family. It's also the first model since CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in developing frontier AI .

According to Anthropic, the new model offers performance on par with its Fable 5.1 model but costs 40% less than Opus 5.

Pricing of AI models has become a key competitive advantage for AI companies. Anthropic said Opus 5.5 will cost $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. The company's Opus 5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.

Tokens are units of measurement for AI models that represent small words or word fragments.

As for safety and security, Anthropic said its Claude 5.5 models have undergone extensive alignment testing, external evaluations, and "safeguards for high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology."

The company also said it is looking to improve rewards for AI alignment and is working on developing "new safety training scenarios."

Earlier this month, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon posted on X that he was resigning from his position, saying that neither the company nor his former employer, OpenAI ( OPAI.PVT ), took AI safety seriously. He also said that the people building the technology "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Anthropic alignment science lead Evan Hubinger replied to Coxon's post, saying the former Anthropic worker is correct and that he believes there is a greater than 10% chance that the technology could "kill all humans."

Shortly thereafter, Amodei posted an essay calling for a slowdown in AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI's ( SPCX ) Elon Musk said they agreed with Amodei's statement.

But others in the industry, such as Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, pushed back on the fears that AI will destroy us all, saying such concerns aren't grounded in science.

President Trump has also derided AI fears as a conspiracy .

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley .