With the current Claude lineup, moving up a model tier beats maxing out effort to achieve the highest intelligence per dollar
At nearly every Cost per Task, we see the largest model sits on the performance vs. cost Pareto frontier for @AnthropicAI models:
➤ Claude Opus 5.5 (xhigh, 57) outscores Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max, 55) with 40% lower Cost per Task and about half the Time per Task
➤ Claude Fable 5.2 (high) beats Opus 5.5 (max), with smaller cost and time savings, and Fable 5.2 (low) beats Opus 5.5 (high)
➤ This pattern doesn’t hold at the cheapest tier, where every step up from Claude Haiku 5.5 (max) costs more