> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thenewway.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol ship hours apart, each cheaper than before - URL: https://www.thenewway.ai/claude-opus-5-5-and-gpt-6-sol-ship-hours-apart/ - Published: 2026-09-23T14:20:39.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T14:20:39.000Z - Description: Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol and Luna on Tuesday, each cheaper per token, and Artificial Analysis has first coding numbers for both. One more story inside. - Author: The New Way Anthropic and OpenAI both shipped new models on Tuesday, less than two hours apart, and both cut prices. Claude Opus 5.5 costs 20% less per token than Opus 5, and Artificial Analysis measured it 11 points ahead of Opus 5 on Terminal-Bench 4.0, a coding test. GPT-6 Sol and Luna cost half what GPT-5.6 did at its promotional price, and score about level with it. DigitalOcean also opened a cloud for Claude Code and Codex. It bills only for the CPU they use. 📌 **In this issue** • [Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5.5, 20% cheaper per token](https://www.thenewway.ai/claude-opus-5-5-and-gpt-6-sol-ship-hours-apart/#anthropic-ships-claude-opus-55-at-20-below-opus-5-per-token) • [OpenAI ships GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half price](https://www.thenewway.ai/claude-opus-5-5-and-gpt-6-sol-ship-hours-apart/#openai-ships-gpt-6-sol-and-luna-at-half-gpt-56s-price) • [DigitalOcean opens a pay-per-use cloud for coding agents](https://www.thenewway.ai/claude-opus-5-5-and-gpt-6-sol-ship-hours-apart/#digitalocean-opens-a-pay-per-use-cloud-for-coding-agents) --- ## Two new models, and a new place to run agents ### Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5.5 at 20% below Opus 5 per token On Anthropic's own coding benchmark, Terminal-Bench 4.0, Claude Opus 5.5 scores 66.4%, against 52.3% for Opus 5 and 55.8% for the pricier Fable 5.1\. [Anthropic hedges its own table](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5-5?ref=thenewway.ai): "the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest." [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?ref=thenewway.ai), an independent benchmarking firm, measured 59.6% on its own run of that test, 11 points over Opus 5, and ranks it #1 on its Intelligence Index. It costs $4 and $20 per million input and output tokens, 20% less than Opus 5\. Anthropic says it will cost 40% less at default settings on typical workloads. At max effort, Artificial Analysis found it level with Opus 5 per task, because it writes 1.6 times the output tokens. Anthropic's [Boris Cherny](https://x.com/bcherny/status/2102543349102338309?ref=thenewway.ai) says a couple of short prompts had it write formal proofs about the Claude Agent SDK, leading to 16 pull requests fixing bugs and race conditions. Subscribers get higher five-hour limits. > Introducing Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family. > > It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks, and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5\. [pic.twitter.com/Q9C2VKQ79f](https://t.co/Q9C2VKQ79f?ref=thenewway.ai) > > — Claude (@claudeai) [September 22, 2026](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2102435511222890900?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thenewway.ai) --- ### OpenAI ships GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half GPT-5.6's price GPT-6 Sol and Luna are [OpenAI's cheaper tiers](https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/?ref=thenewway.ai) under GPT-6 Astra, now $2 and $10 per million tokens for Sol and $0.10 and $0.50 for Luna, 50% below GPT-5.6's promotional price. On coding, Artificial Analysis's [Coding Agent Index](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2102462962758033624?ref=thenewway.ai) has Sol up 2 points on GPT-5.6 Sol, with Terminal-Bench 4.0 at 43% against 37%. Luna fell 2\. OpenAI's [Tibo Sottiaux](https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2102463847714247142?ref=thenewway.ai) calls them "a very significant improvement across the board." ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Business users got a banked usage reset. > Please welcome GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna to the GPT-6 universe. > > GPT-6 Sol and Luna build on the advances behind GPT-6 Astra, bringing much of its strengths into faster and more affordable models to support work at scale. > > We’ve also made caching and inference more efficient, and… [pic.twitter.com/5LiVE4rbFt](https://t.co/5LiVE4rbFt?ref=thenewway.ai) > > — OpenAI (@OpenAI) [September 22, 2026](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2102460975790137662?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thenewway.ai) --- ### DigitalOcean opens a pay-per-use cloud for coding agents [DigitalOcean opened Managed Agents](https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/managed-agents-public-preview?ref=thenewway.ai) to everyone in public preview. It hosts coding harnesses "such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and OpenCode" in sessions that can pause when idle and "resume paused work in \~300 milliseconds." CPU is billed per second of actual use. DigitalOcean's example: two vCPUs at 25% use for an hour "would cost $0.060 in CPU and memory charges, compared with $0.126" for the full allocation. Inference and storage cost extra. > DigitalOcean Managed Agents is now in public preview. > > Run Claude Code, Codex, or your own LangGraph agent in a runtime environment that pauses when idle. Put its tools behind one governed endpoint, and pick from 75+ open and proprietary models. One cloud, one bill. > > Prompts to… [pic.twitter.com/iPiPlxp0iD](https://t.co/iPiPlxp0iD?ref=thenewway.ai) > > — DigitalOcean (@digitalocean) [September 22, 2026](https://x.com/digitalocean/status/2102414817797550320?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thenewway.ai) --- Know someone who'd want this in their inbox? Forward it — that's how this grows. And if we got something wrong, or you think we buried the real story today, hit reply. A person reads every one. ## Ones to watch: early, unverified - [Unreal Agent](https://unreallabs.ai/blog/unreal-agent/?ref=thenewway.ai): Unreal Labs says its agent harness "delivers up to 40% cost savings compared to Codex on production workloads and coding/science benchmarks, without any negative performance impact," by handling tool calls asynchronously. The maker's claim; nobody else has published a run yet. ## Also worth your time - [Max Woolf had coding agents optimize his Rust libraries](https://minimaxir.com/2026/09/agentic-iteration/?ref=thenewway.ai) and reports "anywhere from 2x-20x speedup depending on the domain," with his prompts and benchmark results included. --- *The New Way is written with AI. It gathers the day's stories, checks them against their sources and drafts every summary. A person decides what runs and reviews every issue before we hit send.*