Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 5.5: Faster, Cheaper per Task, Close to Opus 5.5
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, the new version of the Sonnet line it positions for everyday work. The pitch: quality close to its pricier top model, delivered faster and for less.
In brief
- What shipped: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (model ID
claude-sonnet-5-5), on September 28. It's available in the Claude apps and via the Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. - Price and efficiency: Anthropic says pricing is the same as Sonnet 5: $2 input / $10 output per million tokens. In the company's testing it does the same work with far fewer tokens, costing up to 30% less per task than Sonnet 5 and generating output 30%+ faster.
- Comparison (Anthropic's measurements): very close to the top model, Opus 5.5, on many tests. It's ahead of Opus 5.5 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (70.6 vs. 66.4, with Opus at its highest effort setting), while Opus leads on FrontierCode (54.4 vs. 46.2) and Humanity's Last Exam (67.7 vs. 64.5).
- Safety: the first Sonnet with cybersecurity safeguards comparable to Opus 5.5. Higher-risk cyber requests fall back to Sonnet 5, and new classifiers guard against extracting the model's reasoning (distillation).
Our take
Sonnet is the model most people actually use when they work with Claude day to day, so this release will be felt more than most top-model launches. If Anthropic's claims hold, the quality you get without paying for the top model goes up. The practical question for your own work: can some of what you now send to Opus be done well enough by Sonnet 5.5? The way to answer that isn't to trust the company's table. Run a few of your real, recurring tasks on both models and compare the results and the cost yourself. All the figures are Anthropic's own tests, and independent comparisons will follow within weeks. The table itself also shows Opus still leading on some of the hardest work. Read alongside Sonnet 5, the direction is clear: the everyday model moves a little closer to the top model with each release.
Kaynak: Anthropic