Anthropic’s Sonnet 5.5 targets faster, lower-cost AI work
The company says its new model generates outputs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and can cost up to 30% less per task in its testing.
Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, positioning it as a faster, lower-cost option for everyday tasks, coding and document creation. The model is available across Claude platforms and through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The company says Sonnet 5.5 generates outputs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less per task in its testing. Its listed token prices are unchanged from Sonnet 5; Anthropic attributes the potential savings to using fewer tokens to complete work.
Anthropic reported a 70.6% score for Sonnet 5.5 on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 coding evaluation, compared with 10.3% for Sonnet 5. The company cautions that benchmarks capture only part of a model’s capabilities, and notes that some evaluations used a pre-release deployment with a structured-output bug that has since been fixed.
The release includes safeguards for higher-risk cybersecurity tasks, which Anthropic says may fall back to Sonnet 5. Routine software development is not affected, according to the company. Sonnet 5.5 uses the same biology safeguards as its predecessor.
Anthropic describes Sonnet 5.5 as a complement to Opus 5.5, which it says is better suited to complex work requiring sustained judgement. It expects to add Haiku 5.5 to the family in the coming weeks, without giving a firm release date.
