Claude Opus 4.5
Anthropic's largest model became two-thirds cheaper while keeping first place in coding, agent work and computer use.
Why it matters
The price of the frontier began falling inside a generation: cost stopped being what separates the best model from the everyday one.
Opus was the model taken for the hard thing and avoided for the ordinary one because of price. A two-thirds cut removed that line. It continues what began with Claude 3.5 Sonnet in 2024: quality descends the price scale quickly, and a model that a year earlier cost a tier of its own becomes an ordinary tool. It shipped two weeks before the protocol that connects such models to tools passed into shared ownership.