ModelClaude

Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 is 30% faster and cheaper

Original title: Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5

Plain language

What it is: Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, a new AI model in the Claude 5.5 family. It is an upgrade that runs over 30% faster and costs up to 30% less per task than Claude Sonnet 5.
How it works: The model is designed for everyday tasks, fixing bugs, and creating documents, slides, and spreadsheets. It writes more clearly and requires fewer tokens to complete the same work compared to the previous version.
Where it is available: The model is available in Claude apps and on the Claude Platform.
Example: Epic Games used the model to perform a system design audit and a data flow review.

What it is: Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, which is 30% faster and up to 30% cheaper per task than Sonnet 5. It features significant performance improvements in coding, reasoning, and image understanding.
How it works: It reduces costs by requiring fewer tokens per task, halving cache read costs to $0.10 per million tokens, and batching tool calls to reduce steps. It also introduces cybersecurity safeguards and fallbacks comparable to Opus 5.
Where it is available: It is available on the Claude Platform, where it runs at High effort by default, and in Claude apps, where it runs at Medium effort by default.
Example: Epic Games used it to manage tens of thousands of lines of code for gameplay system architecture during early testing.

The headline and explanation on this page are based on Anthropic's post. The full details are in the original.

Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5