Anthropic launches Opus 5.5, first Claude 5.5 model, with China-distillation guardrail that downgrades it to Opus 5

Anthropic has launched Opus 5.5, the first model in the Claude 5.5 family, matching Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks and priced about 40% below Opus 5 ($4 input / $20 output). Its product rules include a guardrail: prompts tied to frontier-model R&D, such as writing kernels for certain ML accelerators, downgrade it to the weaker Opus 5, with context locked to prevent extracting reasoning. The launch comes as Anthropic prepares for an IPO.

Detected & updated continuously · Source: Nebula