Muse Wonder vs Claude Opus 5.5: Same Price, One Index Point of Separation, Very Different Bills

Muse Wonder and Claude Opus 5.5 cost the same $4.00 per million input tokens and $20.00 per million output tokens, both carry a 1-million-token context window, and both are frontier reasoning models with mandatory thinking. On Artificial Analysis' independent Intelligence Index, Claude Opus 5.5 (max) sits at 58 and Muse Wonder (max) sits at 52 — the two configurations are measured in the same 219-model class. That is a six-point gap for identical list pricing, and the more interesting number is not the six points, it is what each model spends in tokens to earn them.

Short answer: if you are choosing on measured capability per dollar and will run a lot of traffic, Claude Opus 5.5 is the safer pick today. If your work is long-horizon agentic loops — computer use, scheduled professional tasks, sustained tool chains — Muse Wonder's vendor-reported profile has genuinely different strengths, and the difference is large enough to be worth testing rather than assuming. Below, the numbers, then the reasoning.

What each model actually is

Claude Opus 5.5 arrived on September 22, 2026 and has had three weeks to accumulate independent measurement and provider coverage. Artificial Analysis lists it across nine API providers, which in practice means it is reachable from most gateways and most clouds without a bespoke integration.

Muse Wonder landed on October 12, 2026 — one day before this was written — from Meta Superintelligence Labs, and it shipped as two checkpoints rather than one. The callable model is muse-wonder-1.0 on the Meta Model API and inside Muse Code; the higher-scoring muse-wonder-full-1.0 is Muse Code subscription only and is not sold per token. Independent measurement exists for the callable checkpoint but is thin, and for the Full checkpoint the only figure widely circulated is Meta's own table entry — Artificial Analysis has a Full row, but it is the evaluator's own 56 rather than the vendor's 59.

That asymmetry is the first thing to hold in mind. Opus 5.5 is a settled quantity. Muse Wonder is a two-day-old release with a vendor scoreboard and one independent lab's read on it.

Head to head on the numbers we have

Both sides of every line below are drawn from Artificial Analysis unless labelled vendor-reported:

• Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (max) — Claude Opus 5.5 58, the highest score in the 219-model class; Muse Wonder 52, in the same class

• List price — identical at $4.00 in and $20.00 out per million tokens, both with roughly 95% cache discounts

• Cost per Intelligence Index task — Claude Opus 5.5 about $5.98; Muse Wonder about $4.52

• Output tokens consumed in evaluation — Claude Opus 5.5 about 260 million against an 85 million median; Muse Wonder about 130 million

• Output speed — Claude Opus 5.5 about 95.6 tokens per second; Muse Wonder not yet published by the same lab

• Context window — both 1,048,576 tokens; Muse Wonder's output budget caps at 943,718 tokens

• Modal inputs — Claude Opus 5.5 text and image in; Muse Wonder text, image, speech, video, and file in

• Reasoning control — Claude Opus 5.5 supports thinking budgets including a no-thinking configuration; Muse Wonder's reasoning is mandatory with an effort ladder from minimal to max, defaulting to medium

• Availability — Claude Opus 5.5 on nine API providers as of this week; Muse Wonder on Meta's own API and Muse Code

Two of those lines are worth pulling out. First, cost per index task: Opus 5.5 is 32% more expensive per unit of measured capability despite an identical price list, which is entirely a function of how many tokens it burns. Second, the token volume: 260 million against an 85 million median is a lot of talking, and it is the single most consequential operational difference between these two models. On a fixed output budget, Opus 5.5 will fill it faster.

Where Opus 5.5 clearly wins

The index gap is not the whole story, but it is not noise either. Opus 5.5 (max) posts the highest index score Artificial Analysis has measured in the class. It has a xhigh configuration at 56 and a high configuration at 54, so you can trade capability for cost in a way Muse Wonder's ladder does not obviously map onto — Opus 5.5 at high still scores above Muse Wonder at max.

Provider breadth matters more than it sounds. Nine providers means competition on latency and regional availability, and it means an outage at one endpoint is an inconvenience rather than an incident. Muse Wonder currently has one vendor path plus whatever gateways pick it up, and gateways picking up a one-day-old model tend to trail the vendor's parameter surface — reasoning-effort enumerations in particular are routinely stale for a week after a launch.

And Opus 5.5's non-mandatory reasoning is a real advantage on high-volume, latency-sensitive traffic. Being able to run a task without paying for thinking tokens is a lever Muse Wonder simply does not offer: every call on Muse Wonder thinks, and those tokens bill at $20 per million.

Where Muse Wonder has a case

Meta's own table does not give the callable Muse Wonder much of an edge over Opus 5.5 on the vendor's own suites, and one of the places it looks like a win is not one. On AutomationBench-AA the vendor reports Muse Wonder at 60.5 and Claude Opus 5.5 at 65.6, so that one goes to Opus. On JobBench, long-horizon professional tasks, the pattern inverts hard — but only when you look at the Full checkpoint: Muse Wonder Full at 75.3, Opus 5.5 at 30.6, Muse Wonder itself at 30.8.

Read that carefully rather than as a headline. The API-callable Muse Wonder scores 30.8 on JobBench, essentially level with Opus 5.5's 30.6. The 75.3 belongs to the subscription-only Full checkpoint. So the benchmark gain Meta is most likely to be quoted for is not available at the price you can actually pay per token — it is available at $50 or $200 per month.

Where the callable Muse Wonder does show a real vendor-reported advantage is Terminal-Bench 4.0-AA at 85.6 against Opus 5.5's 81.5 and SWE-Marathon at 78.8 against 74.2. Both are long-running coding-agent suites, and both are Meta's own harness numbers rather than independent results. They are the right reason to test Muse Wonder for sustained coding agents and the wrong reason to assume it wins.

Modal inputs are the one unambiguous win. Muse Wonder accepts speech and video directly; Opus 5.5 takes text and images. If your pipeline currently transcribes audio before it reasons about it, that is an architectural difference, not a rounding error.

The price tag both models share, and why the bill diverges

At $4 in and $20 out, neither model is a budget choice, and the deciding variable is token volume rather than rate. Opus 5.5 consuming roughly double Muse Wonder's output tokens in the same evaluation framework turns an identical price list into a materially different invoice at scale. Anthropic's model also supports prompt caching at a discount, which is the standard mitigation for a verbose model with a stable system prompt — if your workload has a large fixed prefix, the verbosity penalty shrinks.

Muse Wonder's cost lever is the effort setting. Defaulting to medium and reserving high or max for the calls that need them is the difference between a normal frontier bill and a surprising one, because every effort level is billed the same way and the only thing that moves is how long the model thinks before it answers. There is no cached-cheap path around it the way there is on a non-thinking model.

The one thing you should not do is decide from the price list. Both models cost the same on paper and one of them costs about a third more per measured task. That is a budget question answerable only by running your own traffic through both.

Running the comparison without three accounts

Claude Opus 5.5 is on OrcaRouter at Anthropic's own list price — $4.00 per million input tokens, $20.00 per million output, and a $0.20 cache-read rate, with the same 1M context window and no markup added on our side. That makes it a one-key reference point for the comparison above.

Muse Wonder is not on OrcaRouter, and we will not pretend otherwise: there is no meta/muse-wonder entry in our catalogue, and the honest statement is that Meta's own API and Muse Code are where Muse Wonder runs today. What we do carry from the same lab is Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Spark 1.1, so the Muse family is reachable if you want Meta's reasoning lineage without a new vendor relationship.

The practical version of this article is: put a sample of your real tasks through Claude Opus 5.5 on one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, keep the harness identical, and note the token counts rather than only the pass rate. OrcaRouter routes across 200-plus models with provider list prices passed through unchanged, so when a provider cuts a price the number you see changes the same day. If a provider starts serving Muse Wonder, running the same test against it will be a model-name change, not a migration.

Picking between them

• Take Claude Opus 5.5 if you want the highest independently measured capability available today, if you need a non-thinking fast path for high-volume traffic, or if you want the safety of nine providers behind one model.

• Test Muse Wonder if your workload is long-running coding agents or multimodal input — speech and video are in the model rather than in a pre-processing step — and you are willing to accept a two-day-old model with vendor-reported benchmarks and one independent lab's read.

• Do not buy a Muse Code subscription expecting the JobBench number. The 75.3 belongs to the Full checkpoint, and the API model scores 30.8 on the same suite.

• Watch the independent cost-per-task line. If Artificial Analysis publishes a Muse Wonder figure near $4.52 sustained at scale, the six-index-point gap gets much harder to justify at Opus 5.5's approximately $5.98.

Same list price, one clearly ahead on measured capability, and a token-volume difference that will decide more budgets than the index will. That is an unusually clean comparison — and unusually easy to settle with your own traffic rather than anyone's scoreboard.