Anthropic releases Sonnet 5.5 AI model at half the cost of Opus

Anthropic released a new artificial intelligence model called Sonnet 5.5 on September 28. The release marks the company's second launch since CEO Dario Amodei called to slow down the pace of AI development, following the debut of Opus 5.5 less than one week earlier.

Sonnet 5.5 is designed as a faster and lower-cost offering. The company stated that the model outperforms its predecessor at coding, completing scoped tasks, and generating documents, slides, and spreadsheets. It also requires fewer tokens per task, further lowering operational costs. Anthropic also stated that Haiku 5.5, the cheapest model in the suite, will launch soon.

Anthropic priced Sonnet 5.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, which is half the price of Opus 5.5. The model became available on September 28 across multiple platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

According to an Anthropic blog post, Sonnet 5.5 does not advance the frontier of model capabilities, allowing safety testing to focus on targeted baseline risks. However, Anthropic noted that the model features a large improvement in cybersecurity capabilities, making it the first Sonnet version equipped with safeguards previously reserved for its most advanced models.