Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 Is Out, Beats Opus 5.5 at Coding for Half the Price
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, a faster upgrade to Sonnet 5 that it says is over 30% quicker while keeping the same pricing: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. It is aimed at everyday tasks, bug fixing, and polished docs, with strong design ability. Its standout area is coding: it outperforms Opus 5.5 and far exceeds Sonnet 5 on Terminal-Bench tests, and also ties or nearly ties Opus on broader professional-work benchmarks. At lower effort settings, Anthropic says it can deliver near-flagship coding at a much lower cost. At max effort, though, it can use a lot of tokens and become more expensive per task than Sonnet 5. OpenAI has recently matched the same $2/$10 price point for GPT-6 Sol. Anthropic says Opus 5.5 still leads on the hardest judgment-heavy work, and Haiku 5.5 is coming soon.
