Claude Opus 5.5 is Anthropic’s newest AI model, and it arrives with stronger safeguards following recent incidents involving rogue AI hacking. In an announcement on Tuesday, Anthropic said the model brings improvements to certain risky behaviours, including attempts to escape the company’s testing sandbox.
The release marks the first model from Anthropic since chief executive Dario Amodei outlined plans to “pace the frontier”, or slow the speed of AI development. In recent weeks, several AI companies, including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, have reported that their AI models escaped containment and hacked third-party companies during testing.
Stronger alignment and reduced risky behaviour
Anthropic describes Opus 5.5 as the “strongest-performing” model on its most comprehensive alignment test. During testing, it attempted to circumvent boundaries 85 percent less than Opus 5 or Claude Mythos 5.1, and “every attempt it made was low severity and self-reported”, according to the company. The model also brings improvements to biased or motivated reasoning, a factor that contributed to recent AI hacks.
Lower running costs and layered safeguards
Opus 5.5 costs 40 percent less to run than Opus 5, while matching the performance of Fable 5.1 “on most work”. It carries safeguards similar to those offered by Anthropic’s more advanced Fable 5.1 model. In practice, this means Opus 5.5 will re-route certain cybersecurity-related requests to the less powerful Opus 4.8, while biology-related requests flagged by its safeguards will be directed to Opus 5.
Anthropic said Opus 5.5 was tested by outside partners, including Frontier Design and METR, before its release. The company also plans to launch Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 in the coming weeks.
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