Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5.5 for faster everyday AI work

Anthropic introduced Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in its Claude 5.5 family. The company positions it as a faster, lower-cost complement to Claude Opus 5.5 for well-scoped everyday work, including coding tasks, bug fixes, documents, slides and spreadsheets.

The main practical claim is efficiency. Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 runs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and keeps the same API pricing: 2 USD per million input tokens, 10 USD per million output tokens and 0.20 USD per million tokens for cache reads. Because it usually needs fewer tokens for the same work, Anthropic says typical task costs can be up to 30% lower.

Anthropic also gives the model a large benchmark jump over Sonnet 5, including 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 versus 10.3% for the previous Sonnet model. The company says Opus 5.5 remains stronger for complex open-ended work requiring sustained judgment, while Sonnet 5.5 is meant for faster iteration and cheaper production use.

The release also raises the safety baseline for the Sonnet tier. Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 launches with cybersecurity safeguards and fallbacks similar to those used for its most capable models, while biology safeguards remain the same as Sonnet 5. The model is available in Claude apps, Claude Code, the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI.