Anthropic debuts Claude Sonnet 5.5 as a faster, cheaper mid‑tier model

Anthropic pitches Sonnet 5.5 as a better‑value option for everyday work, narrowing the gap with its top‑end models.

Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, a new mid‑tier model positioned as a faster and cheaper workhorse for everyday tasks such as coding and document creation. Compared with Sonnet 5, released roughly three months ago, Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 runs about 30% faster and consumes tokens more slowly, improving throughput and cost for developers deploying agents. Internal benchmarks suggest Sonnet 5.5 can outperform the higher‑end Opus 5.5 on agentic coding workloads because it can spin up multiple agents without breaching cost constraints. Anthropic also says Sonnet 5.5’s cybersecurity capabilities are on par with Opus 5, and for that reason it will be governed by the same cyber safeguards as the company’s flagship models Fable and Opus. The company adds that an updated version of its smallest model, Haiku, will arrive in the coming weeks, and its release follows a wave of new model updates from OpenAI and Meta.