Anthropic Launched Claude Opus 4.6 with Pricing Hike of 6x for Faster Mode

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 with standard and fast inference tiers, but the fast tier, offering roughly 2.5x response speed, increases costs by about 6x. Pricing: $5 per million input tokens, $25 per million output tokens for standard; $30 per million input, $150 per million output for fast. The fast tier uses a separate capacity pool and is not suited for long-running, batch, or highly cost-sensitive workloads. A Reddit user calculated the per-second output cost of the fast tier is about 2.4x higher than standard. With a限时 50% discount through February 16, the pricing reflects a shift toward tiered, performance-based billing in AI services.