Claude Opus 4.5 is the newest brainchild from Anthropic, the folks behind the Claude language models. Think of it as their latest and smartest tool for handling really complicated tasks—like having an assistant who can juggle lots of jobs at once, and still keep everything running smoothly.
So, what’s actually new here? Opus 4.5 gives you a dial to turn: you can choose how much ‘effort’ the model puts in. Want quick answers? Set it to medium, and you’ll get the same results as the old Sonnet 4.5, but with only a quarter of the output. Crank it up to high, and it actually outperforms Sonnet 4.5, still using less than half the tokens. In plain English: you get more for less. The price? $5 for input, $25 for output, per million tokens.
If you need something fast—like a chatbot helping customers, or a coding assistant that needs to reply instantly—stick with medium effort. But if you’re running big jobs overnight, like moving code or doing deep research, that’s when you turn up the effort and let the model take its time to get things just right.
Early tests are promising. The number of errors drops by half or more, and those tricky jobs that used to get stuck now finish on their own, with the model planning ahead, fixing details, and even sorting out tests.
Why does any of this matter? Because using fewer tokens means saving real money. Suddenly, things like always-on monitoring, automated code reviews, or customer service bots become affordable, even at big scales. You get to decide: do you want speed, or do you want quality?
