Databricks finds Opus 5.5 cheaper and better, GPT-6 Luna 20x cheaper per task

Databricks tested recent AI models across 2,400 engineers and found Opus 5.5 offers the highest quality mid-tier performance, with about 20% lower same-task costs than Opus 4.8.

The company is now encouraging Opus 5.5 as a default model for coding, and reports that GPT-6 Luna is at least 20 times cheaper per task than Opus 5.5, roughly matching Opus 4.6 on one difficult evaluation suite. The Luna findings are preliminary.