The role of AI assistants in everyday office work is undergoing a key shift. Anthropic recently officially announced that it has made its powerful Claude Opus 5.5 the default model for the Pro, Max, Ultra, and Team plans, and is broadly recommending it as the everyday workhorse model for knowledge work such as research, analysis, and writing.
A New Model Matrix and Positioning: From Lightning-Fast Queries to Deep Reasoning
To help users find the most suitable tool for different scenarios, Anthropic has laid out in detail the positioning, use cases, and pricing standards for the current 5.5 and related models:
Claude Haiku 5.5: Positioned as the fastest and cheapest model, built for quick queries and high-frequency tasks such as writing summaries and organizing data. This is the first Haiku model with effort control, priced at $0.10 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens (Note: applies to prompts of up to 100,000 tokens; longer prompts are priced at $0.50 / $2.50). It is best for short, narrowly scoped tasks, and when longer analysis is needed, switching to Opus 5.5 is recommended.
Claude Sonnet 5.5: Excels at fast tasks with a clear scope and well-defined requirements, such as producing polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets from a clear brief. Its price is $2 / $10 per million tokens. Note that if Sonnet is pushed to its highest level under high-difficulty settings, its task cost can approach that of Opus 5.5.
Claude Opus 5.5: Built for most knowledge work, covering research, deep analysis, and finished documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that require judgment. Its price is $4 / $20 per million tokens.
