Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5.5 with 30% faster performance

Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, which it says is more than 30% faster and can cost up to 30% less per task than its predecessor.

The model is positioned as a faster, lower-cost complement to Claude Opus 5.5, with improvements in coding, long-horizon tasks, image understanding, and productivity work such as creating documents, slides and spreadsheets.

Sonnet 5.5 retains the same list pricing as Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, while Anthropic said it typically uses fewer tokens to complete tasks.

Despite retaining the same list price as Sonnet 5, Anthropic said Sonnet 5.5 can be cheaper to run on a per-task basis because it typically uses fewer tokens to complete tasks. The company said the model is also designed to make fewer tool calls, contributing to its faster performance and lower overall costs for users.

"And it’s strong on long-horizon work and image understanding; it’s the first Sonnet model to beat Pokémon Red working only from screenshots," Anthropic said Monday in a blog post.

Because its cybersecurity capabilities are comparable to Opus 5’s, Anthropic said it is the first Sonnet model to launch with cyber safeguards and fallbacks as the firm has developed for its most capable models.

This comes less than a week after Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in the firm's Claude 5.5 family. The model features a major jump in agentic coding performance while using fewer tokens, and is being positioned as a more capable autonomous "worker."

It also comes as the relationship between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and President Donald Trump begins to thaw. Trump hosted Amodei at a private White House dinner Sunday evening, which Axios reported would be their first one-on-one meeting. Notably, Politico reports that Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman are expected to attend a lunch meeting on artificial intelligence at the White House on Tuesday.