This is the biggest news of the announcement. Prior Opus models were strong, but the cost was a big limiter of usage. This price point still makes it a "premium" option, but isn't prohibitive.

Also increasingly it's becoming important to look at token usage rather than just token cost. They say Opus 4.5 (with high reasoning) used 50% fewer tokens than Sonnet 4.5. So you get a higher score on SWE-bench verified, you pay more per token, but you use fewer tokens and overall pay less!