Claude Sonnet 5.5

Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family. It’s a clear upgrade over Claude Sonnet 5, runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work.

Sonnet 5.5 is a faster, lower-cost complement to Claude Opus 5.5. Where Opus 5.5 is built for complex work requiring careful judgment, Sonnet 5.5 is strongest at well-scoped everyday tasks, fixing bugs, and creating polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets. It’s also got a sharp eye for design. Claude Haiku 5.5, built for high-volume and cost-sensitive applications, will join the Claude 5.5 family in the coming weeks.

Sonnet 5.5 improves over Sonnet 5 on:

Performance. Sonnet 5.5 scores 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, an agentic coding evaluation, compared to Sonnet 5’s 10.3%. It scores two points below Opus 5.5 on GDPval-AA, a test of real-world work across a variety of occupations. 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.

Collaboration. Like Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 writes more clearly than our previous generation of models; early testers described it as a better partner for collaboration than Sonnet 5. Its speed also makes it well suited to fast iteration on less complex tasks.

Cost. Sonnet 5.5 is priced the same as Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens, and $0.20 per million tokens for cache reads, but it typically needs far fewer tokens to do the same work. In our testing, it costs up to 30% less per task than its predecessor.

Speed. Sonnet 5.5 generates outputs 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5, making it our fastest Sonnet model to date.

Alignment and safety. On our automated behavioral audit, Sonnet 5.5 improves on or matches Sonnet 5 on most measures of alignment. Because its cybersecurity capabilities are comparable to Opus 5’s, it’s the first Sonnet model to launch with cyber safeguards and fallbacks like those we’ve developed for our most capable models. Its biology safeguards are the same as Sonnet 5’s. Both safeguards target a narrow set of high-risk requests; routine software development and most life sciences work are unaffected.

Performance

Sonnet 5.5 improves on Sonnet 5 across domains—in some cases dramatically. On several evaluations, Sonnet 5.5 at Max effort even performs comparably to Opus 5.5. However, benchmark scores capture only one facet of a model’s capabilities; in our own testing, and in that of external testers, Opus 5.5 remains clearly stronger at complex, open-ended work requiring sustained judgment.

The charts below plot each model’s score against its cost per task at every effort level. As effort goes up, models typically work for longer, leading to a higher cost per task but generally also a higher score. The closer a point is to the top left of the chart, the more capability it delivers per dollar.

On several benchmarks, Sonnet 5.5 at Low or Medium effort beats Sonnet 5’s best score for about a tenth of the cost per task. It complements Opus 5.5 best when running at lower effort settings, where it costs less per task. At higher settings, it can perform comparably at a similar cost.

Coding

Sonnet 5.5’s jump in performance is particularly noticeable in coding. At High effort on FrontierCode, it scores 10 points higher than Sonnet 5 at the same setting, at about one fifteenth of the cost per task. On CursorBench, which tests models on tasks from real Cursor coding sessions, its best score is within about two points of Opus 5.5.

Early testers appreciated how quickly Sonnet 5.5 can understand a codebase. They were also struck by its efficiency: in head-to-head runs, it batched tool calls together more than Sonnet 5, leading to fewer steps and lower costs.