The Design Language on this announcement page is a perversion of human nature.

> Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 will follow in the coming weeks, with many of the same improvements to performance, efficiency, and safety.

Nice. I was starting to think Haiku was going to be abandoned.

They purport 40% drop in costs due to lower token pricing (presumably aimed at winning back the many of us that switched providers in discovering Opus 5 unusable) and improved token efficiency.

> For users with cybersecurity use cases that may be blocked by our cyber safeguards, we recommend accessing our models with reduced cyber blocking classifiers via our Cyber Verification Program. Claude Opus 5.5 will be available through this program in the near future.

Anthropic has used "in the near future" for Mythos-class models too, but CVP is still Opus 5 only.

Why even have the program designed for trusted access to cyber capabilities if you're not providing access to cyber capable models via the program?

Anecdata ahead: I took some time to work with Opus 5.5 today. The work feels strong and comprehensive. I'm not getting the ugly "claudish" speak of Opus 5.0. Communication feels more natural and pleasant to read. Good results so far in my preliminary research.

I use the other 50% of my $200/mo Claude subscription by having Fable run Opus subagents for a lot of work. That way I don't have to deal with Opus directly.

Is it finally getting better than opus 4 though? That's what I really wonder

I found myself going back to Fable over and over again. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m just used to its style or it is truly more capable.

I tried Opus 5 and Astra.

It's awesome that the apt packages for claude and claude-code are out right now. I can test-drive Opus 5.5 right away. Very cool, Anthropic.