We study the spectral properties of the Ruelle–Perron–Frobenius operator associated to an Anosov map on classes of functions with high smoothness. To this end we construct anisotropic Banach spaces of distributions on which the transfer operator has a small essential spectrum. In the ${\mathcal C}^\infty$ case, the essential spectral radius is arbitrarily small, which yields a description of the correlations with arbitrary precision. Moreover, we obtain sharp spectral stability results for deterministic and random perturbations. In particular, we obtain differentiability results for spectral data (which imply differentiability of the Sinai–Ruelle–Bowen measure, the variance for the central limit theorem, the rates of decay for smooth observable, etc.).