Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)
- ID
- 27702
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 23 Sep 2026, 12:51 AM
- Fetched
- 24 Sep 2026, 4:22 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 24 Sep 2026, 4:22 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Claude Opus 5.5 (Max with fallback) ranks #1 of 212 models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 58, nearly 2.3x the median of 25. It is expensive at $4.00/1M input and $20.00/1M output tokens (double the median on both), and notably verbose—generating 260M output tokens during benchmarking versus an 88M median, which compounds cost at $5.98 per Intelligence Index task.
Why it matters
If you're routing agent or production workloads to Opus 5.5 for top-tier intelligence, budget for roughly 3x the output token volume of typical models—verbosity here is a direct cost multiplier at $20/1M output tokens. Consider whether the intelligence edge justifies the price gap over cheaper models, and test output token budgets before committing to it at scale.
Discussion angle
The hidden cost of verbosity: 260M vs 88M median output tokens means Opus 5.5's real per-task cost may be far higher than headline token prices suggest—how do you set output token budgets when a model is both your smartest and most talkative option?