Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 is the pick when you need image input, Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Reflection |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $4.00 | $1.00 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $20.00 | $3.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $8.00 | $1.50 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 7% | 31% |
| Context window | 1M tokens (~1,500 pages) | 1.0M tokens (~1,573 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 69% | 81% |
| Max output per response | 128K tokens (~96,000 words) | 944K tokens (~707,800 words) |
| Input types | text, image, file | text |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-22 | 2026-10-16 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $700 | $135 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B saves $565 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $680 | $150 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B saves $530 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $720 | $156 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B saves $564 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $440 | $98.00 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B saves $342 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $220 | $53.00 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B saves $167 |
| Capability | Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | ✓ Yes | — | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | ✓ Yes | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | ✓ Yes | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 is the pick when you need image input, Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B when cost matters at scale. In short: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 when you need image input, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B when cost matters at scale, you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities, you generate long outputs in one go.
Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B is cheaper: $1.50 vs $8.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 81% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $135 against $700.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4.00 per 1M input tokens and $20.00 per 1M output tokens; Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B costs $1.00 input and $3.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B: 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5.
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5: yes, Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5: yes, Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B: yes.
Only Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 accepts image input; Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B is text-only for input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B up to 944K (about 707,800 words).
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 was listed on 2026-09-22; Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B on 2026-10-16.
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