Anthropic and OpenAI announce more powerful (and cheaper) AI models

The conversation in the AI industry has largely been focused on slowing down AI development or "pacing the frontier," but that apparently won't stop Anthropic and OpenAI from releasing new models. Both companies are iterating on their previous releases, Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, with new models that offer similar levels of performance but at lower costs. In the case of Claude, Anthropic says its new Opus 5.5 model is better at handling complex work, "finding and fixing inefficiencies in software" and financial analysis and business work -- all pitches laser-targeted at Anthropic's enterprise customers. Anthropic's benchmarks claim Opus 5.5 also scored better at agentic coding than GPT-6 Astra on both Terminal-Bench 4.0 and FrontierCode v1.1 (Main), which could make it more appealing for developers. Improvements extend outside of the tasks the model can handle and to how it works: Anthropic claims Opus 5.5 produces writing that's easier to understand, and that it "attempted to circumvent boundaries around 85 percent less often" than past models, suggesting it'll disobey directions less often.