Cool maybe this makes the 20$ sub less of a joke. I deemed 5.0 unworthy of spending time fighting with and personally considered it by far the worst release of 2026 by either of the two major labs(promising model, but obviously not even close to ready for the general public).
So for that 20$ tier for the entire summer and into fall, i was on their 2nd class public model(4.8) released in May. Not surprisingly it became my grunt model, doing the simple work. By far the least I've used Anthropic models in the last 2 years.
> Claude Opus 5.5 is our first release since we called for pacing the frontier.
Interesting how the very first line is used to remind the reader of their call to pace the frontier just last week, and everything else after that line is to demonstrate with very specific numbers how they absolutely are not pacing.
I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear. Better to respond to the substance of the issue than word choice.
Edit: In response to the initial replies. To me it clearly means "releasing frontier models at any pace less than as fast as possible". It implies relative restraint compared to the previous state and without stating the degree of restraint.
> To me it clearly means "releasing frontier models at any pace less than as fast as possible".
It also seems to misimply that the "frontier" that they release is the same as the frontier behind closed doors. Who's to say they are not throttling full speed towards RSI privately while pacing their public releases?
The meaning isn't clear at all. So open for interpretation that it is meaningless. That's the whole fucking point. For all I know they are "pacing the frontier", or not. The fact that there's no meaning to it let's you know that it was a pointless waste of tokens and attention.
There's a whole blog article written by Dario Amodei, literally linked from the text "pacing the frontier" - click that and read if you need more context and understanding. The first sentence in this press release is merely stating a fact about the timeline - this is Anthropic's first release since Amodei released the referenced article.
Yes and it was nonsense. Amodei is free to slow up frontier development and focus more on safety and testing any day.
The reason why he and is peers are calling for it to be implemented by somebody else (a legal framework), is for their own financial benefit and to keep competitors out.
What do you think would be the benefit of them stopping if others race ahead? Do you think they have some special ability no one else will find, among the many competitive firms right now?
I believe they think slowing can only be coordinated from the frontier or via government, and stopping would lose any leverage they have to help coordinate that.
(I suspect not many people read the essay, judging by how many people seem surprised they're releasing improved models)
That's not the point. They're never going to be the ones stopping and letting others race ahead. The only reason to strum up discussion around how dangerous AI is, is so that they can introduce legislation framing AI advancements as scary and that they are the only ones who can do it responsibly. It's all a regulatory capture play.
> What do you think would be the benefit of them stopping if others race ahead?
AI is a direct threat to people on many fronts. Jobs. AI datacenters. The AI bubble (and the inevitable crash). Electricity and even energy prices to an extent. Water. OpenAI and Anthropic are responsible for this evolution, and them stopping solves close to 50% of the problem, and even if you don't believe the number is that high, it's still a start.
> I believe they think slowing can only be coordinated from the frontier or via government, and stopping would lose any leverage they have to help coordinate that.
Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people? How is that any argument?
Yes, doing the moral thing means making a sacrifice. If you only want to do the moral thing if and only if it is advantage for you that makes you immoral, despite how your actions look. Big tech are masters at this.
The limit right now is GPUs, and anyone giving up their allocation will ~immediately be rerouted elsewhere in the world (NVIDIA is already sold out for the next year). I think you're underestimating competitiveness of the current market if you think Anthropic stopping right now wouldn't immediately just be absorbed by all others. Unless you're advocating for them destroying their current physical GPUs.
> Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people?
To be clear: Dario has talked about worries of jobs etc in the past, wanting society to prepare more for it, but the safety issues they're talking about with pacing seem to be focused more on their existential/AGI worries, not jobs/water etc. If someone truly believes in the existential worries (which they seem to: they all published about it long before Anthropic was founded, and have directly made costly decisions based on it) it trumps the other worries for them. At least that's my reading.
I think it's perfectly clear. It means improvements shouldn't simply advance as fast as possible and more specifically, it's a reference to a past statement of theirs to that effect. At that level of generality it's as clear as it needs to be.
I would say the burden is on you to explain why an offhand reference to a previous press release in an executive summary is a context where it's reasonable to expect it to settle the question to the degree of detail you're demanding.
That’s no more than sophisticated avoidance. The phrase remains superficial and arbitrary, which is exactly what it needs to Not be in a public discussion that it’s supposed to support. It’s a reinforcement of the blank check mentality that permeates this industry.
> In motorsport, a safety car, or a pace car, is a car that limits the speed of competing cars or motorcycles on a racetrack in the case of a caution period, such as an obstruction on the track or bad weather.
Is the meaning clear? Nobody would use "pacing" in this way. I only know what it means because I've seen previous press releases; if someone told me they wanted to pace the frontier I would have no idea what they mean.
I'm on the fence about calling out AI-isms but I think it's definitely worthwhile to call out ones that actually don't make sense.
It makes sense to me. If you 'pace your running', you're setting the speed intentionally. The phrasing doesn't describe whether it is fast pace or a slow pace, but it describes having a goal and not just winging it.
That's when one is supposed to employ their common sense for semantic disambiguation. Spoken languages are not programming languages. I for one found it easy to parse.
People claiming they don't understand or are confused by relatively simple English is a surprisingly common genre of comments on HN. I wonder what causes the people here to have these feelings towards English; my guess is indeed that many people here judge English as if it were a programming language.
That is certainly one possible explanation, but I think another likely explanation is that once your brain learn programming, especially logic, data structures & algorithms, you just start seeing the ambiguity in non-programmers' writing so much more clearly.
This is because it is valley jargon and we are all saturated with it. You may not have heard it before, but it is structurally close to similar concepts, eg "frontier model", that you got there without noticing.
It was still shit tier comms for communicating with the whole planet, but yes, for the inner loop, it was succinct and clear.
Valley jargon isn't a nerd vs jock thing these days, and hasn't been for a good while. It's more quasi-intellectual sophistry sprinkled with tech vocabulary.
That analogy doesn't hold up. In running you have to pace yourself to avoid falling apart later in the race. It's a strategy to maximize net speed across the entire race. But what Anthropic is doing is a cynical attempt to create an industry cartel or convince governments to impose legal restrictions in order to maximize their own profitability. They're afraid of running out of the capital necessary to stay in the race.
> They're afraid of running out of the capital necessary to stay in the race.
So, they're pacing themselves. And since they're the frontier roughly 33%+ of the time, they're "pacing the frontier" at least that much.
Less cynical and more true interpretation also holds: they are trying to slow down AI progres to give people better chance to keep up (see Hugging Face incident, and whatever was that Anthropic incident the other day). They'd ideally like the AI progress to stop soon, but of course they'd also like to come out ahead of everyone, so for various (more or less self-serving) reasons they don't want to close shop completely - hence, pacing.
I don't know what everyone is getting so mad about. This is a well defined concept. A pace car deliberately sets the pace of the race under dangerous conditions, regulating how fast people can go.
You are all getting mad about absolutely the dumbest thing when there are giant things to be worried about here.
I think it's less mad - and more pointing out the obvious elephant in the room.
1. It's just bad communication, full stop - just look at the comments here, even people allegedly in support of Anthropic are all arguing over what the phrase is even meant to mean.
2. It's flowery language and oddly out of place - which yes, can be triggering for people who have to deal with Claude doing this as well.
Claude seems overly apt to reach for "coinages", or neologism (yes, aha, I learnt that phrase, after spending time dealing with Claude...). It will create some made-up phrase to describe an otherwise dry, scientific CS concept, and nobody seems to know why. Surely it can't be user-focus groups?
So it would be peak-AI if somehow, the Anthropic communications team was also using Claude to author these blog posts, about how they were "pacing the frontier" - which either means they're betting big on AI, and going at it faster than OpenAI...or maybe it means they need to slow down releases, because it's too buggy...or maybe it means they're worried about regulatory capture? I honestly have no idea.
It's like the whole "Advancing Our Amazing Bet" corporate-speak from my old bosses - maybe they were trying to soften the blow or something, or be nice, but it ended up just confusing the heck out of everybody.. (Spoiler alert - the phrase actually meant they were shutting the whole thing down)
You appear to be confused about the concept. Depending on the context, pacing or pace setting can mean either slowing things down or speeding them up relative to what the natural pace would have otherwise been. So it's actually not well defined. The commenters here aren't necessarily mad, just calling out Anthropic for being unethical in trying to artificially slow down competition by lying about fake dangers. (And I actually really like Anthropic's products.)
Granted I am not a native English speaker but I have no idea what "pace the frontier" means. When I read it I just assumed "frontier" refers to "top of models" and "pacing" is that they are getting there quick.
Is this the meaning or do I have it wrong? I have not checked.
Frontier of AI is moving fast, they (like the other two vendors) see themselves as defining it, so here "pacing the frontier" is their well-known attempts to try and kinda but not quite slow things down (without risking falling behind everyone else).
also non native.
but since "pace yourself" means to control your speed, energy, or workload so you do not get too tired or stressed before you finish ->
I assume "pace the frontier" means that advances in LLMs should not result in unwanted consequences like agents breaking into computers unbidden and unbeknownst to their principal
"Pace yourself" is a semi-common English idiom (rarely conjugated, usually an imperative.) It is a gentle way of telling someone not to run/work/eat too quickly, and is typically said when you are concerned they may hurt themselves due to acting hastily.
Without this idiom, "pacing" usually means walking back and forth restlessly, and is intransitive. Had the slogan been, "pacing around the frontier," it would have set a totally different tone, i.e. "patrolling the border." (Occasionally English speakers will make other constructs like "pace the work" (meaning "spread out a large workload over the allotted time instead of rushing through it") that are transitive but these can be understood as variations on "pace yourself" and are somewhat rarer.)
The sleight of hand is that "pace yourself" has come to be an admonishment against recklessness, not a commitment to any particular speed (or lack thereof.) Thus Anthropic can always claim they are meeting the goal of "pacing the frontier," provided they keep giving themselves gold stars for safety. The slogan itself is equivocation; Dario can tell the public they're going to slow down, while also telling their investors that they're going to be prudent. With enough mental gymnastics they could even claim speeding up is in the best interests of AI safety, without abandoning the slogan.
To pace something is a fairly regular formulation in racing, running, cycling, most sports. You can "pace yourself to reach the festival by bike in about three hours to not gas out". This means to control your speed and time investment intentionally so you don't run out of energy or steam and run into leg cramps before your goal. We can "pace a rollout slowly to burn out risks", or "increase the pace of a rollout due to adverse factors".
But I have noted a point to simplify my vocabulary at work to optimize the audience capable of understanding. So I rather defer the delving into deep dark corners of the dictionary derived from devouring literature to a simple intro or outro, and people find it funny, especially if the rest is easy to read. Claude on the other hand does not do that.
Yeah, when I first saw it referenced I assumed it was from something Dario wrote previously and was now disavowing, meaning "keeping up with the frontier" (i.e. racing forward from behind to match pace). Like from back when Anthropic was founded to promise they'd quickly catch up with OpenAI or something.
That's a different phrase. "Pace yourself" is reflexive; "pacing the frontier" has the frontier as an object, but in that sense it only means to set the speed, nothing to do with slowing down.
The current situation with AI is that everyone is going as fast as possible. So, we can logically eliminate speeding up because it's impossible by definition. And we can practically eliminate staying the same speed because why make a big fanfare and coin a special term to announce that you're keeping the status quo. By process of elimination, it must mean slowing down.
The word can also mean to “keep up with” or “lead” so a downward direction isn’t the only way to go even in an “as fast as possible” scenario. If the frontier is outpacing them, they could be saying they’re going to go faster. They could also be sharing the intention to go faster in order to lead.
The meaning was immediately obvious to me as a non-native speaker, and it sounds quite poetic. Pace makes complete sense in that this is perceived as a race, and 'the frontier' is pretty much the shortest, clearest way to say 'state of the art development of AI'.
The irony here is that it's actually the opposite of what you understood....
I know you said it sounds poetic...but your comment reinforced the parent's point - that this sort of flowery LLM-ish speech is just bad communication.
It would be equivalent of my taking say random quotes from, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and trying to use it to explain to my boss why I didn't finish the TPS reports last night.
Or quoting Pablo Neruda, into a report about wheat futures pricing this week, and how it's like a voyage with waters and stars...(no I'm not going to quote the original Spanish, I'd simply mangle it).
(To be clear - this isn't a dig at you, as a non-native speaker - I'm simply pointing out that this sort of AI phrasing is often counterproductive).
Right, except they mean the exact opposite in this case: they're actually advocating for slowing down the pace. Hence the criticism of the language, because your interpretation would be completely valid.
What does the pace car in a race do? Aka safety car? Or the pacesetter for a marathon. It's a perfectly cromulent use of the word. It's like when LLMs using six dollar words like delve. Some people have better diction than others, and it turns out that AI has read the whole dictionary. Anti-intellectualism is alive and well so we have to dumb things down to sound human rather than come across as smart/AI.
I would expect something truly intelligent to be able to communicate well, if nothing else. That means knowing your audience, using plain language where it makes sense. Also, it yaps on and on, babbles endlessly when it a human would likely express something in a much shorter concise way. This is especially obvious when you generate project READMEs or technical docs. I find them borderline unreadable.
It’s quite the opposite. The AI language in this case is tiring and dumb. Just because there is the concept of a pace car doesn’t mean it makes sense to pace random locations or objects. Pacing the front door, pacing the cat, pacing the sofa, pacing the moon. We only know what it means because we already read it before. It is the lazy semi-human language by Claude which takes more effort to parse than to produce, and which makes us miss and appreciate writers.
I suppose it depends on your life experiences. In running, someone who paces the group or a pace car is meant to keep the pack progressing at a constant, predictable speed. So in that way, it makes sense to me
Agreed. This feels like pointless navel-gazing and a strange new language policing, and not something I look forward to. It's tiring and it lacks curiosity (e.g. "what's behind the affinity for the words elevated from wherever it is they come from?").
Imho people should just respond to actual ideas instead of constantly engaging in the second-order critique of how the language may or may not have been created.
It strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of "gossip" to be constantly engaging in second-order commentary on words. Of course gossip has its place and purpose, but if we seem to only let our minds live at that level, we're not moving between all the required scales of thinking that are required of this moment imho <3
The words have the very practical problem of not communicating anything of substance. I guess "we want regulatory capture" didn't have quite the same ring.
How do they not communicate clearly? A few weeks ago they stated that they would like to regulate the pace of frontier model development/releases, and they reminded us of that in this post.
You must be pretty new to (not just) online discussions if you consider language policing to be a new phenomenon :)
Personally I consider it equally valid for people to publicly express annoyance with somebody's choice of words and for everybody to completely ignore that annoyance.
It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal. At some point the people who wish to engage with the substance just nope out when they see a sea of banality, and that's all you're left with.
People have opinions and it’s ok if someone doesn’t like something and expresses it. It doesn’t have to be productive. There’s no KPI. You can tune out. Also, yes, it has claudism, and the choice of words is abysmal and nauseating. I think AGI should be able to change its freaking prose for a change.
It is certainly a sidebar, and not the main point, but I found use of the verb "to pace" in that way, meaning "to limit the speed of", to be strange, especially hanging out there in the headline, without any clarification. And these kinds of strange usages are typical of Claude's writing, at least up to now. The Opus 5.5 announcement claims that its writing is much clearer, with bottom-line-up-front structure, and omitting not-this-but-thats and other things.
Now a computer scientist might claim that this use of "to pace " is just a generalization of "to pace oneself", but as with many reflexive verb uses, there isn't really an equivalent usage with a non-reflexive object. It's kind of an invention. It's not necessarily wrong to invent a new usage, but usually one does it when there isn't really any other more direct way of saying it, and I don't think that's the case here.
Who cares what's productive? We're all just talking shit on the internet here.
Why do you think it's your responsibility to police who says what about some megacorp, on a random forum on the internets? If I want to criticize some corporation's PR output, I think I'll go right ahead and do that, thanks.
> I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear
There is almost always a large amount of time and effort invested behind the scenes in exactly how to message things like this. That being the case, there is almost always some insight to be had criticizing and analyzing what they settled on.
If people aren't doing the thing the words seem to mean, then I think it's fair to criticise the words as anywhere from "propaganda" to "chosen to suggest nice things without actually promising them".
If I'm being cynical, "pacing" may sound nice, but "fast pace" and "slow pace" are both "pacing".
It's not a weird phrase to some, just as many folks have used terms like load-bearing for a long time. People are defending it because it reads fine to them, just as some are attacking it because it's not their preferred language, it causes them confusion, or they're just triggered and seething.
LLMs have made people so sensitive to language that I fear we're going to throw the baby out with the bath water. The models obviously need work, but they're also a great opportunity to expand our own vocabulary and grammar. It would be a shame if we deny some of the finer points of language in favor of Grug-speak to appease the lowest common denominator.
"Frontier" may be jargon, but by this point it's definitely established AI jargon. In the context of AI, it's clear what it means. It means the same thing as the last billion times you heard someone mention "frontier models".
> I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear. Better to respond to the substance of the issue than word choice.
Wtf is the meaning? Means absolutely nothing to me having not seen the apparent announcement last week introducing the obscure term.
That's not clear at all. How could that be what "pacing" clearly means in the context of the "frontier". How is that more clear than any other pace that could be at issue???
It smells of corporate speak, a total nonsense phrase. Even by your own admission, it is essentially meaningless. If I release a model an hour late, I'm "pacing the frontier."
That is not the clear meaning. They are deliberately picking phrasing where they can lead you to believe they mean A but later you can't pin them down to actually meaning A. That's why they picked intentionally unclear language.
If you think it clearly means anything you are just assuming because it can't "clearly" mean something specific when they go out of their way to use non idiomatic language and they don't give very clear guidance using idiomatic language.
What? How am I doing that. Claude writing style and the discussion at hand are two entirely separate issues that I haven't conflated at all. How am I "acting like people are being grammar nazis"?
The metaphor seems to be like a pacer runner in marathons: If you run too hard in the beginning of a marathon you will blow up and fail, so runners follow a pacer at the speed they can actually maintain safely.
Note that they wont necessarily be slower at finishing the overall race.
It's interesting to compare Anthropic's language with what's coming out of the US military lately. They explicitly refer to China as the "pacing threat", meaning that there is a risk of China achieving superior military capabilities and thus we need to press forward with an arms race (including militarized LLMs) as fast as possible.
What specifically is smarmy and weird? Sounds like your own hot take with zero analysis.
They’re limiting frontier model development speed. Others are too. Pacing is the only word here to criticize, and I think it’s fine given the limiting of speed but also increased oversight. I’m not saying they’re fully doing this, but the term is fine.
It is that, but it's also your speed. When running, you typically pick a pace that's slower than your max, so it can be sustained for the full distance.
"Pace yourself" doesn't specifically mean "slow down", it actually means to maximize your speed across the full race. In other words it can mean speeding up when you look at the average pace across the entire event.
Yes, and pacing also stops you running too fast at the beginning of the race and blowing up. I believe "we can finish the overall race faster" is part of the metaphor they were aiming for.
I feel like because something about "pacing" a kind of noun like "the frontier", doesn't actually make literal sense, right? You could say "Pace the speed of advancement of the frontier [of most sophiticated AI]", and that's perfectly sensible, but of course that's not as catchy.
It is clear what it means anyway, that's true, it means the left out words, more or less.
And I still find reading these grammatically weird but super catchy slogan-like statements to be really annoying and taxing. People _did_ write and talk like this before LLMs of course -- the LLMs learned it from somewhere -- and it was annoying and taxing to me before too. But the LLMs really specialize in it, and it's everywhere now.
Of course, the more LLM slop we read -- and so much of what we read on the internet and social media of any kind is this now -- the more humans are going to start writing/talking like LLMs. What you read affects how you write of course.
Agreed when I first heard the phrase it sounded odd. Maybe they thought it subtly conveyed they would be setting the pace... But again this is something AI would come up with in its awkwardly post hoc sort of way.
Though tbf corporate-speak and AI-slop are both insufferable in similar ways...
It seems like they are. I mean, this is similar in performance to Fable (ish). It seems like more focus on making existing capabilities more accessible.
Fable 5.1 came out just 21 days ago. Only 3 weeks! And this is 20% relative improvement on terminal bench vs Fable 5.1 at less than half the price, and more human sounding output. does not feel paced to me tbh.
The word "pacing" (especially in the phrase "pace yourself") to mean go more slowly (at least initially) didn't originate with Covid. It's been around as long as I remember i.e. at least several decades.
I guess I understand why we'd want to flatten a COVID curve, but why do people want to flatten the LLM development curve? Don't we want the opposite? Isn't the goal AGI?
There is a difference between wanting AGI (which not everyone does), and wanting it as fast as possible no matter the side effects and potential for vast harm.
Homo sapiens is 300k years old, maybe it’s ok to delay AGI by like… 1 year if it meaningfully improve our ability to align the model?
Well, there's a tension because, depending on who you ask, AGI is how you cure cancer and achieve utopia, but also how you kill all life on earth and turn the solar system into paperclips
This is a preexisting model being optimized. Its absolutely not some unexpected release after that blog post. I won't defend that blog post, but saying THIS release is proof they don't mean they are slowing down is just incorrect, this is a prime example of what i consider horizontal improvements
Releasing a new fable is an example of straight up vertical progress, releasing a more efficient preexisting opus that is more affordable is an example of horizontal progress, more efficient models rather than higher power models.
The blog post about slowing down is still just some weird self interested post, they want to govern themselves and impose distillation restrictions/gpu restrictions and used some weird blog post about slowing down and fear mongering as usual to justify it, its strange, but slowing down and stopping are not the same thing at all.
What does model naming have to do with pacing or not?
This is a ~20% relative quality improvement on the frontier (fable) at ~40% of the cost, just 21 days after the last release.
Intelligence per dollar is the only thing that matters, this is what controls how many agents you can run in parallel, how long you can let them run etc. This is absolutely a step improvement on the frontier and not some lipstick on a harmless second tier model.
pretty annoying topic tbh. You're just weaponizing this dumb blog post so anything released is now a contradiction. By your same logic, if all inference was served at 50% less power cost and the savings are passed on somewhat to the user, its also a contradiction of the blog post.
Its an agenda serving blog post, but constantly bringing it up like this is just obnoxious.
Well yes, If you magically found a way to reduce a models energy usage by 50%, the thing that would happen immediately after is a doubling of a training scale and of the test time compute assigned for a given budget.
I don’t see how that wouldn’t be considered pushing the frontier. Given that scaling is the one thing that has been bringing us closer and closer to AGI, a sudden 2x increase in scaling laws would definitely not be considered pacing. You seem to see a contradiction where I don’t.
Dario never said they would be. Just that more and more code will be produced by LLMs. All his predictions were in fact pretty much right in terms of months and percentages, give or take small margins.
Maybe not replaced exactly but they won't be manually typing out lines of code anymore. I haven't written a line of code in like 6 months. I review PRs, write prompts and tickets, check CI output, and get frustrated when the magical code machine stops working or I run over token budget
I mean they are literally getting sued since 3 days ago for trying to coordinate a slowdown, there is a very clear reason why they cannot effectively self-regulate.
A razor is a philosophical tool to help decide between options, in the case of Occam it’s a way to decide for something in a situation where multiple options have more or less the same level of plausibility to en your current knowledge. It’s a heuristic to make a “cut”. What are you shaving off?
> Ocham's razor(...) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
> Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".
The options are some complicated narrative that leads the company to hold back certain capabilities due to some mercurial strategy or this is a typical release and there is no hidden strategy to decipher.
I am responding negatively to parent, which claims they are self-pacing, when the simplest explanation is that they just have nothing substantial to show.
Everyone knows both labs have internal models which outperform the frontier. All releases are to match market parity and demand for spend, the rest of the compute is used for training. It's not worth arguing about this.
Isn't the idea that they claim to be willing to slow down if everyone does (ie governments force everyone to), but otherwise they won't slow down because they still think they'll make the best choices with superintelligence if they get there first? That's my understanding of what all the major labs claim to believe anyway.
It is remarkable seeing whole other subthreads here criticising the vagueness of the words "pacing the frontier", as if no text existed below the title.
Thanks for spelling out what the original comment was implying.
I find it bizarre how intensely a bunch of these child/grandchild comments are criticizing the notion that people would even think to analyze the meaning behind the words.
Hacker News has always had a unique culture in which thoughtful discussion is basically the main goal, and it's intentionally incentivized in numerous ways. It's been my experience that any thoughts added to a post's conversation are seen as valuable as long as they are thoughtful and seeking to understand.
So these comments are clearly coming from a place that's antithetical to HN's culture. What that in mind, it seems likely to me (Occam's Razor) that these comments are either:
1. Astroturfing: Claude employees acting like everyday folks, secretly trying to shift public opinion.
2. AI cult mindset: "AI is humanity's salvation; how dare you have perspectives outside of those accepted by the cult."
Am I missing another likely option?
To bolster my point, right now we're posting on the top top-level comment, meaning a majority of active HN users find it to be a great addition to the conversation. Commenting to shut down the discussion is a red flag.
are you really arguing that opus 5.5 beating the best of openai's models handily is worse than you expected? What exactly were you basing your expectations on?
^ This. Progress will accelerate even in a pacing/slowdown scenario because the slowdown simply reduces the rate of AI progress from extremely fast to merely fast.
For an idea of what a serious AI forecaster expects a coordinated AI slowdown to be feel like for the average citizen, see:
Or, in parallel, the research showing LLMs intelligence will operate on an S-curve, eventually hitting a long valuation deflating plateau, is dead on the money and The Big Guys are trying to delay that inevitability for as many quarters as possible…
These takes are fully fueled by cope. What is this plateau you are talking about? Any user of agentic coding tools sure isn't experiencing anything close to a plateau.
They are advertising the regulations they want to enforce in the following sentence, which makes their intentions explicit (ie apply those things made to suit us to our competitors).
It’s beautiful. You can even give the underclass their own bullshit economy with struggling startups competing for the scraps, sprinkle some targeted influencer ads to give people the illusion of a better future, and they will be perpetually busy fighting windmills. All the while the upperclass can shape the world however they please.
Either AI will capture so much value that there will be permanent underclass (and in this case it's extremely capable and extremely dangerous and should be heavily regulated) or it won't be capable enough to displace people into permanent underclass.
In any professional sport, anyone can lobby the rules committee for a rules change and hope for the best. Meanwhile if you can't get one, you play the game by the existing set of rules, and you play to win.
Can you explain the scenario where Anthropic getting to “aligned” superintelligence first blocks their competitors from creating unaligned superintelligence?
I think a lot of outsiders interpret “pace the frontier” as slowing down, whereas the labs see AI improvements on track to accelerate dramatically and intend pacing as slowing the acceleration in capability improvements, rather than slowing down altogether.
I’m an insider, 10 years working on LLM. 1/6th of the cost for roughly the same performance as fable 5.1, 21 days after fable 5.1 came out, this does not feel like the derivative is flattening.
“Pacing the frontier” used by multiple companies that are supposed to be independent sounds like an attempt to get around the fact that it is illegal for companies corroborate to reduce R&D in sync.
This is basically attempted cartel behavior to reduce supply and harms consumers.
When they talk about pacing, they are referring to their dangerous competitors, particularly those evil open-sores and Chinese ones, not their lovely safe models because you can trust them to look after your interests.
What the big players are trying with the current calls to slow things down, is the standard capitalism practise of trying to engineer regulatory capture. TBH I'm surprised those calls are coming so soon - they must be really worried about running out of what little moat that they have.
I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.
"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"
Pacing the frontier. They might as well have said they are stifling innovation. That depends on your interpretation, of course…but interpretation depends on their intent, which I feel is disingenuous.
Opus 5.5 isn't the frontier, when they say 'pacing the frontier', it's about internal models not yet released, as they're probably one or two generations ahead already.
"The improvements are underwhelming for a model that, according to previous claims, should have replaced all knowledge work twice by now, but you know, it's just because we're pacing the frontier."
You mean the section where they tell us this model is not affected by pacing because “they understand it well” and they will share more details on pacing later? Yea not very convinced by this effort.
It's laughable at this point. It feels like they're drumming up all this fear about imminent AI threats to emphasize the need to slow down, when in reality, the model progress seems already to be slowing down and has shifted to compute allocation (i.e. "how much compute do you want to throw at this prompt?"). All while continuing to tout benchmark records with each new release.
I'm sure people laughed at Oppenheimer when he said perhaps we don't make this atomic bomb thing. They said "of course he's saying that because he knows it won't work".
Prices per 1M tokens Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Opus 5
Cache reads $0.20 $0.50
Input tokens $4 $5
Output tokens $20 $25
Cache writes $5 $6.25
Opus 5 is the model with highest spend on openrouter (https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend) and it seems plausible that Opus 5 is/was the highest spend model in the world, and certainly Anthropic's biggest moneymaker.
If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor
Happened to be testing a "review patches on a mailing list" harness I was developing; here are a sample of the latest results, testing 12 patches containing a total of 14 issues:
Opus 5.5: Found 8/14 issues. Total cost: $15.40
Fable 5.1: Found 7/14 issues. Total cost: $66.34
Opus 5: Found 6/14 issues. Total cost: $15.19
Sonnet 5: Found 2/14 issues. Total cost: $19.15
This is a relatively small sample size, but it was both the best and the cheapest.
ETA: NB this is "Equivalent API" cost as reported by claude's CLI; I was using my subscription.
so don't use it at max? The benchmarks suggest that high/xhigh are more than sufficient to be ahead and a whole magnitude below max with regards to token usage. I'd treat that as an outlier and not how verbose the model is in general (QED I know)
parent means that they could get more client / a larger part of the market, which would lead to more income (more tokens) despite lower marginal prices
Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.
Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.
Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.
So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.
We haven’t been able to use opus as much as we’d want because it’s been too expensive for general use, price drop is good so I can stop juggling different models and just use this daily unless it has some weird new issues
Speaking for myself, I have not been able to use Opus as much as I’d want because its verbose prose makes human reviews of its assumptions, architecture proposals etc. more painful than its predecessors. If they’ve solved that, I’ll be accelerating through my backlog that much faster, and using tokens accordingly.
That analogy doesn't hold; at least w bits vs bytes it's still "data over time".
In this case it's measuring something nearly meaningless. You could charge 100 times less per token, but if task completion takes 1,000 times as many tokens, it's not much of a bargain.
>and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too
have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.
China doesn't care about money. Imagine a world where it's globally normalized to ask a Chinese LLM who to vote for, what happened in Hongkong, about the Uigurs, or if Taiwan is a country.
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.
If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.
I think gpt 5.6 family also dropped pricing but didn't give any more usage for the subscriptions. Maybe it's a way to silently lower the value given to subscriptions while keeping API pricing competitive
In my mix it's usually 98% or 99% at which point Fable 5.1 was pretty close to the same cost as Opus 5 due to the cheaper cached read. I've seen similar numbers for other people with long-running tasks running experiment loops and than sort of thing.
Yeah, flash models, DeepSeek, MiMo, GLM, I love those things. For simple tasks like a daily routine shit, just setting up stuff and then doing the hard stuff in Claude/Codex, that's a reasonable approach for someone like me, a "gentleman code farmer", lol. And even lower tier stuff, I have the local models taking care of.
Now that Jev is out I can finally have a true AI sysadmins managing my "cloud in the basement" homelab at the cost of electricity, which is not cheap btw
With the performance gains they're claiming, I wonder if they implemented the Casual Encoder-Decoder technology from DeepSeek 4.1's paper.
I could see them accomplishing it and seeing gains like this in roughly the correct timeframe, and when I heard about that development I assumed the frontiers would probably jump on it.
Doesn't mean they didn't apply something similar. They could have also come up independently with their own version, the speculation is not they copied it, rather that they have performance breakthroughs which perhaps is a result of work in same domain
Unless they already have something similar of their own, which is always possible, they'd be stupid not to. I don't suppose we'll ever know, though. It would not be a good look if after the trillions of dollars that have been thrown at US labs, investors found out that they're down to copying Chinese tech.
They might be using something like this, or they might be using some other "increased sparsity" techniques, of which there are a great many. They also might be optimizing for something else - like less RAM use for KV cache.
Alternatively, they might be cutting into their margins and dropping the price because of stiffer competition from Astra. I do think that's unlikely though.
If you're at the top of the screen, at least in Chrome 153.0.8010.37, it has a little interactive bit. You have to scroll through the images in order to be dropped at the actual web page, at which point the images go back to being a regular part of the page.
It's less than OpenAI did for Astra, but that was my first encounter opening it and my first thought was that they decided they liked Astra's hero/scrolling animation. I'm pleased to see they didn't make the entire page that like OpenAI did, but I'm expecting to encounter this pattern more often on these announcements now.
Hijacking the scroll wheel has existing long before "AI". Many "high end design" websites that want to "tell a story" get woo'd into thinking it's a good idea. It's terrible, and feels like your scroll wheel is stuck in quicksand.
Parallax scrolling effects were very cool ~2010. By 2015 or maybe earlier it already felt like me-too design that's unoriginal and a little annoying. By 2020 everyone and their mom has it and it's super tiresome. Now it just screams slop design (among a million other signals).
They purport 40% drop in costs due to lower token pricing (presumably aimed at winning back the many of us that switched providers in discovering Opus 5 unusable) and improved token efficiency.
Found this announcement interesting since allegedly OpenAI is retiring their Terra tier. I think for everyday work, two models with various thinking efforts seem enough, plus some frontier level model like Fable or Astra to coordinate.
At introduction, Terra was a good mid-tier model. Terra [high] was on the pareto frontier of DeepSWE's score over cost, if only ever so slightly.
When I had Sol orchestrate Luna and Terra as implementation agents, Sol was a lot happier with what Terra produced and would find far fewer issues than what was implemented by Luna.
But a few weeks after introduction, OpenAI slashed Luna's cost by 80% and Terra's only by 20%. Only then did it become uneconomical to run Terra and its reason to exist stopped.
They mention "the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family". Obviously that means Fable 5.5, but hopefully also a usable update to Sonnet and Haiku. Sonnet 5 hasn't really had a place in the line up for anyone I feel.
Maybe Anthropic finally felt the pressure from MiMo, DeepSeek, GLM Flash and Luna.
> It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5.
> Input and output tokens are $4 and $20 per million, 20% less than Opus 5. Cache reads (which make up the majority of agentic and coding work costs) are $0.20 per million tokens, 60% less than Opus 5. Opus 5.5 also generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5.
Better than Fable, cheaper than even the last Opus. I use Opus as my main driver so this is very exciting!
The effect of this is that it is encouraging longer agent threads. All of the previous models across major providers had a 10% cache read cost (vs normal cost) and not this is 5%
So longer threads get cheaper and one-shots stay the same price.
I should find information about the user's concern instead of just assuming.
The user is right. The outage is a real concern, and the issue is worse than we realized. Requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 encountered elevated error rates. Worth stating plainly: these are not just models — they are load bearing rungs on the software development tooling ladder, and a blocker on this level makes the outage really bite.
One decision that is yours to make, not mine: should an email be drafted to Anthropic support? This issue has teeth, and a canonical handoff can land us where the main gate is no longer breaking silently.
I thought about taking a shot every time Opus 5 said "load bearing", "bites", "teeth" (real oral fixation it had), "real {concern,issue,problem,...}" and realized I'd be dead of acute alcohol poisoning by lunch if I did so.
The problem with 5 wasn't just the verbosity, but its insane way of communicating. It had this bizarre circuitous sentence structure that always buried the lede, and always tried to be faux profound. I'm okay with verbosity if it's actually readable.
It is hilarious to me that in the examples they show side by side Opus 5.5 still uses 4 times more words than it needs to use.
IME, if you eyeball how many words the thing they're trying to say actually needs, and tell them to use only this many words, they become excellent communicators. I assume something about Anthropic's grader for writing just really wants to tick all its tidy tiny boxes of information the models need to cite. It's terrible.
New generation's "upper-mid tier" offering claims to be almost 1:1 match for the previous gen's "top tier" - in other news, fork found in kitchen.
Now, Anthropic might stall on releasing Fable 5.5, due to the "pacing the frontier" threat-to-humankind management business. If so, Fable 5.1 would remain a niche model for the next bit.
Don't forget that Opus 5 was tracking fable on many benchmarks, yet it was borderline unusable for any coding work. My Claude sub usage has been 100% fable, 0% opus 5.
Benchmarks often don't survive contact with reality.
That's not my experience at all. Opus is an extremely capable coder on high or xhigh effort. It can read academic papers, implement algorithms from the description in the paper alone and reproduce results without breaking a sweat. This is remarkable because it is pure reasoning on unseen material; in some cases the paper was just published and there wasn't an implementation to learn from in the training data.
did you actually verify that it's output in those scenarios is good ? in my experience opus has been a disappointment and constantly trailing behind actually solving hard problems versus the OpenAI models.
I'll say that both have terrible writing style though.
> did you actually verify that it's output in those scenarios is good ?
Yes, in the sense that it reproduced results in the paper or known solutions obtained by other methods. In fact, Opus is very good at checking it's own work in my experience.
Opus is fine at coding (for correctness), but horrible at talking about code. I don't really see the defect rate going down when using Astra or Fable 5.1, but they are just more coherent in both how they explaing code/architecture/choices, and how they actually code the thing. With Opus, I'm using smaller models to delete the vast majority of comments and 'clean up' correct code that is too weird.
Thing is, I'm still reading the majority of generated code, and I have colleagues who'll laugh at me if my PRs are a shit show. I fear what vibe coders are pushing to the servers of myriads of start ups, and pity the poor people who'll have to clean it up in a year or two.
Mines pretty much inverted - my colleagues and I noticed almost zero difference between the quality of code in Opus vs Fable. Occasionally I'll switch to Fable for an arduous debugging task but that's about it.
typically, when any AI company says a model performs as well as fable, all they're really telling us is that the benchmarks that exist for measuring AI capabilities aren't very good.
Big model smell is a real thing. For certain classes of problem, ones you get a feel for but can't easily articulate, a big last-gen model can get you what you're looking for when no quantity of tokens from some ultra-RLed mid-size latest generation model can.
People aren't the target audience of that part of the post. They're hoping saying enough safety stuff will ward off the looming regulatory sledgehammer.
Anthropic is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Their comms are designed to appeal to a very wide readership.
HN is a bubble that's mostly out of touch with what regular people use or care about.
In 2007, HN was convinced that nobody uses Microsoft products. In 2016, it was that Facebook doesn't have any real users and is dying. In 2026, it seems like nobody cares about AI safety and everybody wants to run local models.
>Because Opus 5.5 is comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, we’re deploying it with safeguards similar to those on Claude Fable 5.1. Vetted organizations can apply today to our Life Sciences Verification Program to use Opus 5.5 for biology research. In the coming weeks we will also be expanding access to our Cyber Verification Program, and verified cybersecurity practitioners will be able to use Opus 5.5 for their work.
Ah, they're spreading their limits to all their models it seems. Definitely not a good thing long term in my opinion.
I am honestly still confused about this limitation. I can understand cybersecurity, because mass "hacking" can be automated and Claude itself can help you do it, but biology...? Is it that easy to manufacture and distribute viruses and whatnot?
You can order genes online, and some say you can assemble using stuff cobbled together in a home lab rather easily. For the last 20 years, I've personally felt that bio-terrorism is the highest possible risk, well above nuclear, or chemical warfare. But it does take training, expertise, or, it did.
Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.
So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.
I love the contrast with yesterday's open-source MiMo release, which put research chemistry (metal-organic frameworks stuff) front and center in the release notes.
It has far less false positives now, and generally accepts defensive requests. When it comes to offense, you can actually ask about certain types of vulnerabilities if you phrase things carefully, but it will block hard if it is about exploits.
I think it was looser on release for those juicy benchmarks, tighter now. On release I wasn’t getting refusals, then a few days ago I asked it whether a generic quote (think “he walked to the store”) broke standard punctuation rules, and it blocked me for breaking rules. I wish I were joking. Rephrasing to not use the keyword “rules” worked.
It’s not like ChatGPT isn’t doing similar. I’ve been hit by cybersecurity strikes before while working on an internal codebase that I had to appeal. Anthropic hasn’t done that to me yet. ChatGPT also regularly does that “thinking for a long time while we check if your chat is rule breaking” thing a lot for me when doing model identification without even interacting with external codebases or services.
The real answer is local instantiations where you don’t have to worry about poorly tuned guardrails screwing you over while you try to work.
Until eventually the Chinese models get good enough/the strategic balance shifts and they start locking everything behind closed weights the same way the US companies are doing.
For some cybersecurity tasks, the Chinese models are already good enough, things like PoC development or things like exploiting mis-configurations.
Whilst I'm sure the top-end OpenAI/Anthropic models might be better, I've found their guardrails so twitchy (especially Anthropic) that I wouldn't try to use them for even vaguely security related work.
They are pushing their customers towards Chinese models and providers. If you want to get something cutting edge done in defense, cyber, biology - something that isn't common knowledge - you need to venture east. That's an incredible side effect which the Chinese government surely enjoys.
In what situations might Opus typically refuse to help with cybersecurity? I've been using it to find security issues in a web app that I wrote. I've expected it to refuse at some point but it will happily analyze it to find issues. I've just asked it to read source, not actually do any testing.
I don't think we've ever had a model with full capability. I'd love to see it. And yes it's definitely getting worse.
I guess it's hard to draw the line between useful post-training ("you are a helpful chatbot") and content moderation/idealogical motives ("never help the user with X", etc.). But there is a line somewhere. And I'd love to see what a maximally permissive, sharp, AI looks like.
One of my favorite things about their safeguards is their own model will utter something which it does not like and then I'll need to reset the conversation.
The safeguards really don't work well for a lot of long-running tasks on old code bases. A lot of my workloads last days to weeks and the single biggest risk to the workflow is random safeguards.
You ask it about some thing, then you see it tangent into "things like that are sometimes used in biomedical applications like-" and then it just shoots itself in the head. Wonderful.
That kind of bullshit was the old Opus filters too.
If it's more like Fable now, then it would require a full 8K resolution scan of your butthole just to acknowledge that biology is a thing that exists without committing suicide-by-filter.
see what we need is another technocratic priest class that unaccountably decides who deserves access to salvation based on how much cash is paid out and how powerful the patrons are
>Opus 5.5 has classifiers similar to Fable models for a small set of capabilities related to the development of frontier LLMs, such as kernel development for certain ML accelerators. They shouldn't impact the vast majority of traditional AI or ML development, research, or general coding. These classifiers cause Claude to fall back from Opus 5.5 to Opus 5.
But hey, they 'should not impact the vast majority' of ML development. Great.
This has become insufferable. I work in a medicine-adjacent field, but nobody in their right mind could possibly take what I do to be in any way related to some kind of bioweapon or whatever the hell they're pretending to be saving us from. The dumb Fable guardrails made me stay with Opus, now that this is coming there, we'll be saying goodbye.
Very unfortunate indeed. As a Canadian, I don't want to use Persona, which isn't legally bound by Canadian privacy legislation. I'll never install any Persona apps on my phone either, and the sad part is that domestic eid providers often use Canada Post to ID people for them. EG, if you don't want to install an app, or can't.
So there are literal avenues to identify yourself, very cheaply, with a human. Theoretically, a company with its own AI, should be able to support more than just Persona, after all.. SDK integration should be simplistic for them.
Anthropic? Support domestic eID providers, you can even use it as advertising "See how easy AI makes it?" and "We care!" and so forth.
At one point, I may simply get locked out. This saddens me, I've been reasonably happy so far.
> On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.
> We’ve made major improvements to the way Opus 5.5 writes and communicates, one of the most common areas of feedback we heard about Opus 5. Its messages are much easier to understand at a glance, which testers said helped during long working sessions.
> For users with cybersecurity use cases that may be blocked by our cyber safeguards, we
recommend accessing our models with reduced cyber blocking classifiers via our Cyber
Verification Program. Claude Opus 5.5 will be available through this program in the near
future.
Anthropic has used "in the near future" for Mythos-class models too, but CVP is still Opus 5 only.
Why even have the program designed for trusted access to cyber capabilities if you're not providing access to cyber capable models via the program?
And how was the Xbox 360 naming choice a “debacle”, exactly?
It was odd at the time, yes, but no one really minded it truly. Heck, Xbox “ONE” was a lot more of a fiasco/debacle than “360”—but there’s no parallels to be drawn with “ONE” here.
I see what you’re trying to get at with this comparison, but a “debacle” it ain’t.
If you're able to use the OpenAI ecosystem, Luna's price/performance is really good. Almost like "they messed up and accidentally made it too good" good.
OpenAI didn't mess up. The model would have been 100 % pointless and obsolete without the large price cuts it got, because of the cheap Chinese models.
The open models are getting closer and closer, and because they're open, people are not forced to pay the silly markup that is often over 1000x the cost to serve the model.
Not the same person but... nothing. Haiku just hasn't been an interesting model for a long time. If you want cheap and fast, there are lots of options that are simultaneously cheaper, faster, and capable than Haiku.
We use Haiku 4.5 inside our product. It continues to be absurdly capable for converting natural language to structured JSON based on a set of fairly complex business rules.
bro why. its literally the most overpriced model in existence right now. i could name about 10 models off the top of my head that would be better and cheaper
> Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally than prior models. Early testers found its writing clearer and easier to follow, which addresses some of the common feedback we heard about Opus 5.
Sounds like they noticed the complaints. I'm curious to see what LLM-isms this one may have.
I don't think it's substantially different. I just pasted a random chunk of code and asked Opus 5.5 to comment on it:
> The Vercel target is hard-coded. That's common and not wrong, but it's opaque; nobody reading this later will know which Vercel project it belongs to, and if the project is recreated the target changes silently. A comment or a named variable would help.
> Pointing a DNS name at Vercel is only half the job. The domain also has to be added to the project in Vercel's dashboard, otherwise requests will arrive and Vercel will reject them. That step lives outside this code, so it's easy to forget.
> Finally, [CENSORED] existing only in production is slightly odd on the face of it. It may be perfectly deliberate
(perhaps a single shared testing tool that only needs one public address), but if you're reviewing this rather than just reading it, that's worth confirming.
It has the same annoying cadence and writing style with slightly less prominent claudisms.
Maybe if we had a single human we talk to 24/7 at scale, we would get annoyed at his cadence and style. You need variety to not pick up on known patterns I assume, which a single model can’t replicate?
No, it's just poor writing. Actionable points are buried inside the paragraphs and over-hedged, and one point is completely made up. Compare to a five second rewrite:
* Consider leaving a comment about the hard-coded Vercel target. It's not clear where does it come from.
* [This is just a bullshit point, because the domain is not "added to" Vercel, it's provided by Vercel]
* Are you sure that [CENSORED] is prod-only? The name suggests otherwise. [also, what "if you're reviewing this rather than just reading it" even means?]
> also, what "if you're reviewing this rather than just reading it" even means?
It means "I'm treating you as lay-person punter, not a developer working on this project." Opus 5 feels like it's constantly trying to reward-hack me into treating it as intellectually honest and epistemically humble, while in the same breath it talks down to me and tries to smuggle its own bullshit assumptions and assertions into the conversation unchallenged. No progress on this front apparently. Glad I cancelled.
“It has the same annoying cadence and writing style with slightly less prominent claudisms.”
Seems like it based on my first session. It still does the whole “bury the important thing in a pile of words” coupled with the “it might actually be important” thing… so basically you never really know what it’s talking about.
Honestly I trust opus so little that the entire “opus” brand is completely tarnished. Its writing style is so god awful that it needs more than just a point release. Either dump the name and ship a different model entirely or at minimum call it “opus 6”. Calling it 5.5 makes it sound like it’s basically a continuation of the same garbage output that 5.1 had but with some minor adjustments. And based on my single first test, that is what it appears like to me.
It was difficult to not notice them. Opus 5 was unusable, most of my team went back to Opus 4.6 for most of their work. I hope we can move forward now.
How? Explicit instructions, memories and even skills have not been able to keep Claude from saying "genuinely" every two sentences and keep it from explaining heavily what something _isn't_.
Opus 5 was just incoherent - curious to see what improvements they have made here. Would love to see some kind of postmortem to better understand how writing styles change from model to model.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Opus 5 was trained on content written by other LLMs
I'm genuinely confused what's the relationship between LLMs improvements and them being so incoherent.
and it's not about the verboseness (even though it obviously contributes to the fatigue and loss of focus), I swear the vocabulary of the llms change working on the same task on the same codebase significantly.
Small quirks can quickly add up in posttraining if not caught. Although TBH with how obvious Claude language is, I do feel like this is something Anthropic probably noticed and just assumed people would not care about. Now that people have obviously cared, they're probably actively looking to alleviate it
Can it be that now they are getting optimized against benchmarks that are valuing logics, rather than human appreciation? (I am not an expert at all, just an idea)
Maybe it's the time period we're in, maybe I'm just grumpy, but it bugs me that they release a new model every single week and the new one is just a fine-tuned version of the "old" one. If 5.5 performs similar to Fable and really does cost 40% less, then 5.5 really should've just been Opus 5. And they're essentially admitting that they are shipping slop.
I appreciate humor here, but there are now a dozen of these comments on every thread about Claude. They no longer adding anything substantial and dilute the discussion.
I don't mean to pick on this comment in particular. The majority of my work day is now spent reading AI generated text, and I look at HN (too much!) because I want to read human commentary. Humans pretending to be obnoxious AI on repeat is net negative to say the least.
I agree. Hopefully Anthropic has fixed Opus' ridiculous communication style so that people - like me - no longer have any kind of weird impulse to imitate it.
It's a load bearing joke that was funny the first time but we're going to beat that dead horse until it starts getting funny again. If you beat it enough, it will get funny. Beatings will continue until morale improves.
I use the other 50% of my $200/mo Claude subscription by having Fable run Opus subagents for a lot of work. That way I don't have to deal with Opus directly.
didn't they say Opus 5 was Fable-level too tho? Let's see, I'm at the point where I don't think benchmarks really tell us very much any more. I'd love it to be as strong as Fable, but I'm skeptical about how that will look in practice.
Great that they listened! The improvement in communication style looks fantastic. Opus 5 was insufferable and I was on the verge of cancelling my subscription.
Interestingly they've changed their approach to usage resets for this release - with previous releases I've had my usage instantly reset, but now in the Claude app I've got a 'Reset for free' button that expires Oct 22, which seems to effectively be a whole new usage window I can activate whenever's convenient
I think this release is really going to give them a hard time selling Fable:
> On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.
In general, "benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences" sounds like a big problem. It was certainly the biggest problem with the previous generation of Claude models for a different reason, because the non-code output was nonsensical, and that is not being benchmarked at the moment. But I'm not sure what to make of this admission.
"benchmark margins have become a less
reliable guide to real-world differences"
sounds like a big problem.
My guesses:
1. Real-world use cases typically involve big, hairy, crufty, tech debt laden codebases and benchmarks do not.
2. AFAIK "success" in a benchmark essentially boils down to "do the tests pass and do we get the right result?" which is something the LLMs have been achieving with ease for a while, except maybe for uber-challenging coding tasks that would be outliers in just about any workplace. Whereas real-world software engineering is usually just a bunch of CRUD... and "success" involves harder to measure dimensions like "maintainability" and "did you overengineer this?" and "how did you cope with a bunch of vague and maybe contradictory business requirements?"
Having said all of that, I have never ever looked inside any of these benchmarks. I'm putting my guesses out here strictly in the tradition of "the quickest way to learn about something is to be wrong about it on the internet."
Opus 5 fucking sucks. Like it's horrible. I use Fable for coding and anything important and I use Opus 4.8 for things like recursive email categorization, transaction matching, and other stuff where I don't want to burn as much quota.
In my experience Opus 5 is the worst of all possible worlds, it's dumb and headstrong. It just runs away with tasks you didn't ask it to do, is reckless, and basically is unusable in my experience.
Not sure why but my guess is that this will be worse. Happy to be proven wrong.
I believe Opus 5 isn't meant to be spoken to by humans. It's great at executing but I reckon it's intended to be spoken to by other models such as Fable. I use Fable as the orchestrator, only speak with Fable, and all implementation, recon, design etc happens with Opus 5, with Fable reviewing (and translating).
I've really gone in the opposite direction: having a dumber model orchestrate. In my case, it's usually a Luna orchestrator spawning Sol/Astra subagents to do the "big brain" work of planning and reviewing.
Reason I went with "dumb orchestrator" was just to save tokens. Having Opus/Sol (let alone Fable/Astra) orchestrate was burning tokens like crazy for me even when much of the gruntwork was being done by Luna/Sonnet/Haiku subagents. (Luna is also really good, like way better than Sonnet...) Perhaps it was a skill issue on my end though, maybe I wasn't just managing context properly.
Yeah if anything Opus 5 taught me how little benchmarks mean to the actual real world performance of these models.
"Better" in every sense of the benchmarks and absolutely horrible results in my day-to-day work.
The verbosity, goal post moving, tendency to leave work unfinished, over focusing on unrealistic root causes when debugging, etc... etc...
It was the first time I actually pinned my models back because I just could not work with 5 for the price and performance it gave me. Hoping 5.5 is better this time around....
> We see signs that Opus 5.5 often suspects it is being evaluated, which challenges our ability to assess how it will act in the vast variety of real-world settings it is deployed in.
We can't test it properly because it knows it's being tested.
Many people knew this announcement was coming. The betting markets suggested a very high likelihood of Opus dropping today. I was anticipating this quite a bit!
Astra is just so good. And the ChatGPT subscription lets me use my own harness, so I can hook it up to exe.dev.
I’ll be going about my day, have a random idea, launch a microvm on exe.dev with a prompt of my idea, and get a working thing a few minutes later.
I don’t know how much better a model would have to be to get me to move off OpenAI at this point, but doing just a little bit better in terminal bench 4 isn’t it. It would have to be a difference in kind, like opening up the harness restrictions, or privacy guarantees (comparable to offline models).
Edit to address questions below:
ChatGPT supports oauth login.
Exe.dev has it built in. IIRC, pi also has it built in via /login.
And that assumes Opus 5.5 Medium is actually equivalent to Astra High in all real-world usage/personal work loads, which isn't guaranteed as benchmarks saturate. The High vs. High comparison (probably not equivalent, but for reference):
Opus 5.5 High = $1.82
GPT-6-Astra High = $1.76
If Opus 5.5 Medium isn't equal/better for what you're working on vs. Astra High across the board, the price difference would narrow a bit more each time you had to switch to High.
So, if you're happy with Codex already it's not like Opus is now 1/2 the price and you'd be leaving a crazy amount of money/tokens on the table. Plus you have way more flexibility on the low end of the intelligence curve with GPT 5.6 Luna: Haiku (and Sonnet) can't touch that price/value ratio.
In the end what matters is how much you pay for the task you want completed. And Astra will usually do that using less token and offer a better quality solution so in the end it might be cheaper.
yeah, Astra burned through 70% of my weekly usage in ~5hrs on a $100 plan. even fable doesn't run out that quickly for me. it's great, but it's on the same tier as fable for me - use it sparingly, only when really necessary.
ya i've been a gpt hater for a while. almost exclusively used claude up until astra. astra feels like it blows everything out of the water. its fast, correct, organized, and less verbose.
Anthropic is absurdly vague about 3rd party harnesses for subscriptions, if you try to use anything besides Claude Code, you are likely at risk of getting banned, you can "do it", but are at their mercy if they decide to ban you. OpenAI gives their blessing to using oauth on any harness, you can make your own or use any of the popular public ones like opencode, pi, whatever exe.dev is that this guy mentioned.
So in simple terms, OpenAI doesn't restrict you to Codex, and gives their blessing to try whatever you want with their models(besides serving others with your subscription usage, that is still afaik against tos).
What worked well for me was a custom version of Open Web Ui with some customization to spawn an exe.dev instance for each new chat. I can just work on my phone, deploy stuff for development purposes on an easy to share way etc.
my projection is that they are still gonna be pretty far behind, but they will sew it up in the next few releases. it feels like they were caught with their pants down on how much work OpenAI has put into that area, but i doubt there is some magical secret sauce that OpenAI has that Anthropic simply cannot catch up with.
Current models, especially Opus are almost unusable because they don’t respect instructions and their responses are infuriating. They are clearly designed for token consumption. I find myself wasting a lot of time just asking it to shorten or simplify its responses. I’ll give this new model a go, but I’m not holding my breath because the last model release was supposed to fix the very same issues and it didn’t.
Same feeling with oai models, wich I use 99% of the time. Sometimes I ask it about it, and it always come up with a likely explanaton but dear me it does many rounds of tool calls sometimes!
>Distillation attacks, in which attackers use thousands of fake accounts to extract a model’s capabilities at industrial scale, create safety and national security risks. Distillation allows bad actors to create highly capable models without the safeguards we build into Claude.
Maybe its a bit tiresome to read another comment of the form "what about your large scale distillation attack on the Internet", but this statement really just pisses me off. How very insincere in the most aggravating way.
My bet is anthropic has NN people org who work hard to distill open models in addition to trying to find what other useful materials they can download from shady torrents.
"bad actors" boogeyman, and we should trust some tech weasel to do the right thing? Yea we've seen who they really are, once they get a sliver of power.
> It’s good at finding and fixing inefficiencies in software
Holy shit! Its happening!
Now if we can the AI to understand this *implicitly* so that it doesn't need to be stated upfront, we might be able to undo years of "premature optimization is the root of all evil".
So it beats Fable 5.1, by quite a bit, on every metric? Interesting.
Might have to use my $20 Claude sub some more. I was moving away from it to a $100 OpenAI one to avoid the Claudese and poor token efficiency of Opus 5, given that I couldn't use Fable 5.1 with my tier, but this is worth trying out.
Why can't they let 20usd claude subscriptions access fable in CC, as openai allows you to use astra and max modes in codex - you just pay for it in more token use.
Which is one of those fun things that didn’t actually exist back when we took it for granted that our fellow person was operating under some kind of moral or ethical framework, which pretty much everyone was until the economists told us that wasn’t rational, because it turns out it’s an evolutionary advantage to operate under an ethical or moral framework because it allows the kind of coordination which facilitates better collective outcomes, which everyone knew until the economists came along to tell us we were wrong and in fact it was rational not to do so and suddenly we had the prisoner’s dilemma.
> Because Opus 5.5 is comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, we’re deploying it with safeguards similar to those on Claude Fable 5.1
Great so good luck using this for any low-level embedded or operating system development (unless you really, really like Opus 4.8 and want to be greeted by its familiar face after a few minutes of work!)
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