> they are still clearly in the lead on coding and will continue to do well until someone definitively passes them.

I think the first implying the second might be a bit of a stretch. At some point, companies are going to start looking at their AI spending and start negotiating deals. OpenAI is right behind them and Anthropic is around 8x more expensive (Sol 6.1 vs Opus 5.5 based on Artificial Intelligence's cost per task; cost per token is a somewhat useless metric when different models use vastly different numbers of tokens for the same thing). Chinese models like Deepseek 4.1 Flash are cheap, can be self-hosted, and while certainly behind Claude Opus 5.5, are still good.

Lots of companies buy "inferior" products like Microsoft Teams. Over the next 5 years, it seems likely that many models will get really good to the point that people often won't be able to tell any difference. Even if something isn't "definitively" better, companies might say "our engineers can't tell the difference and we're cutting our costs by 85%."

It's not absurd to think that a company would use its own harness or an open source harness and/or put a proxy in to route requests variably. For two months, they have engineers using different models unbeknownst to them and they measure things like how often the engineers have to correct or redirect the model. At the end of two months, they might find little difference in performance and switch to a much lower cost model.

It's not like it'd be crazy hard to analyze workers frustration as they did their jobs and figure out if one model was actually better. They could log all the conversations and it's not like AI can't easily determine things like "no, that's completely wrong" as a phrase showing that the agent was really off base.

I think a big part of the next 5-10 years is going to be about cost/efficiency.

Opus 5.5 is also more cost efficient than Opus 5 - costing 50% lower. Anthropic margins and/or people's usage has to be higher to continue growth.

I’m not sure it’s a binary thing that contradicts.

I want AI and these companies to succeed. And I especially want new companies to succeed. But I want them to be valued far more realistically. Because if they have to be worth trillions, then there’s a real motivation to do what it takes to realize that valuation. And that’s how you birth a Zuckerberg.

I’m not rooting for them to fail. I’m rooting for the correction to happen sooner than later.

As a counterpoint I haven't seen opus doing that much better than the latest gpt models? Astra is definitely comparable to fable and sol has been as good as opus for me. So this rings a bit anecdotal and that's probably what people will be seeing affect the growth trajectory too.

Opus 5.5 actually decreased my Anthropic spend, because I stopped using Fable once it came out.

I ping-pong between different agents all day long and don't necessarily agree that Anthropic is clearly in the lead on coding at this point.

Anthropic can remove all access to their LLMs and start replicating entire software companies. Anyone relying on open weight models is at risk of a security breach from even slightly better models. It is ironic when people think Anthropic is the one without moat while they give all their data away.

Yeah there was a vibe shift towards OpenAI being much more competitive for daily use and then Opus 5.5 hit. Will be curious to look back and see if that shows in data. Of course, could change tomorrow.

Opus 5.5 may be occasionally better than other models on code (I find this debatable though, because Astra is very good and will often do better imo), but I would wager there's way more money to be made on things like image and multimodal tasks or at least nearly as much, and frankly even Gemini 3.8 flash can spank Anthropics best models on visual tasks and be absurdly cheaper; that also ignores the increasing aggressive classifiers Dario seems to like which block a lot of stuff and I've seen drive a number of zai subscriptions because blue teaming is increasingly very important.

Opus 5.5 is amazing and has also dropped our bill dramatically. Our engineers are spending 1/3 as much as they were before and seem actually happier with the results.

Has anyone else seen this?

This is likely true, but doesn’t really tell us much about future revenue growth. Now they need to compete on price, I think their revenue growth may start to look much more like typical Jevons paradox examples. I.e as their usage grows exponentially their revenue grows linearly rather than exponentially as it was before.

I’m wondering whether Opus 5.5 would have caused growth in an absolute sense or just growth relative to competitors.

Anthropic’s market share is pretty high and there is not enough total currently addressed market for growth at the expense of a competitor to make a big long-term difference.

Except the IPO declared numbers on revenue end in June, so whether or not Opus 5.5 improved revenue or not, it's opaque to potential investors.

I've been throwing opus 5.5 at problems I got stuck on with sonnet in the past and it has breezed through them all. It really reinforced how far the models have come.

> I'm sure there are a lot of people rooting for their IPO to fail but they are still clearly in the lead on coding and will continue to do well until someone definitively passes them.

Then why all the rush to IPO then?

The strongest chinese models from DeepSeek, Kimi and z.ai are already good enough to run for hours on most coding tasks cheaply.

I reduced my Opus 5.5 usage and increased my Haiku 5.5 usage.

I wonder if more people using Haiku coming from more expensive models may have an impact in those metrics.

I have zero sense of this myself, am just curious, and not confident anyone really knows, but: I get that its a big deal for software developers when each new model comes out, because its perceived (correctly or not) as the next big boost for their productivity, but what about everyone else who is not a coder? Is there big reactions there to newer models? I don't know a single person who is not a engineer that would be able to tell me if "Astra" or "Opus" are Anthropic things or an OpenAI things respectively, much less when and what the big new version is for any of them. Does this play out for others? Or am I just in my own bubble for some reason?

What does average, non-computer Joe or Jane think when the next big model comes out? "My emails are going to be so much better now, I better stay subscribed"? "I can't wait to see how well it answers my questions"?