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 dramatic reduction from the $15 and $75 rates for its predecessor, Claude Opus 4.1, released earlier this year. The move makes frontier AI capabilities accessible to a broader swath of developers and enterprises while putting pressure on competitors to match both performance and pricing.”We want to make sure this really works for people who want to work with these models,” said Alex Albert, Anthropic’s head of developer relations, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “That is really our focus: How can we enable Claude to be better at helping you do the things that you don’t necessarily want to do in your job?”The announcement comes as Anthropic races to maintain its position in an increasingly crowded field. OpenAI recently released GPT-5.1 and a specialized coding model called Codex Max that can work autonomously for extended periods. Google unveiled Gemini 3 just last week, prompting concerns even from OpenAI about the search giant’s progress, according to a recent report from The Information.Opus 4.5 demonstrates improved judgment on real-world tasks, developers sayAnthropic’s internal testing revealed what the company describes as a qualitative leap in Claude Opus 4.5’s reasoning capabilities. The model achi …
