Claude platform release notes: September 22, 2026
The numbers tell the story: 1M context, mandatory thinking, same-model price cut. Opus 5.5 is the release where long-context agentic work becomes default, not premium. The always-on adaptive thinking means you're paying for reasoning upfront instead of buying it separately, which simplifies cost modeling. If you're building multi-step agents on Claude, this is the week to test the migration path. The price cut also changes the competitive math versus GPT-4 Turbo.