Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 is here: Cheaper AI, infinite chats, and coding skills that beat humans

Anthropic released its most capable artificial intelligence model yet on Monday, slashing prices by roughly two-thirds while claiming state-of-the-art performance on software engineering tasks — a strategic move that intensifies the AI startup's competition with deep-pocketed rivals OpenAI and Google.The new model, Claude Opus 4.5, scored higher on Anthropic's most challenging internal engineering assessment than any human job candidate in the company's history, according to materials reviewed by VentureBeat. The result underscores both the rapidly advancing capabilities of AI systems and growing questions about how the technology will reshape white-collar professions.The Amazon-backed company is pricing Claude Opus 4.5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — a d