Opus 4.6 Fast Mode available on AI Gateway
Claude Opus 4.6 Fast Mode: 2.5x faster outputs. 6x the price. New trade-off for human-in-the-loop workflows.
Why it matters
Anthropic is monetizing speed as a premium tier on Claude Opus, enabling faster coding and planning tasks through AI Gateway—a direct signal that inference speed optimization is becoming a core product differentiator and pricing lever.
The key facts
6 to knowClaude Opus 4.6 Fast Mode delivers 2.5x faster output token speeds
Fast Mode priced at 6x standard Opus rates ($30 input, $150 output per 1M tokens vs. $5/$25 standard)
Available via AI Gateway with SDK support and Claude Code integration
Marketed for human-in-the-loop workflows, large coding tasks, and planning without context switching
Early, experimental feature
All standard pricing multipliers (e.g., prompt caching) apply on top of Fast Mode rates
Go to the source
Vercel Blogvercel.com
Publisher excerpt: Fast mode support for Claude Opus 4.6 is now available on AI Gateway. Fast mode is a premium high-speed option that delivers 2.5x faster output token speeds with the same model intelligence. This is an early, experimental feature. Fast mode's increased output token speeds enable new use cases,…