Claude Sonnet 5.5 hits Snowflake Cortex AI preview

Snowflake is positioning the arrival of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 as a way to give teams a faster option for everyday work without leaving the Snowflake environment. The model lands first in public preview through Cortex Inference, while Snowflake CoWork, Snowflake CoCo, Cortex Agents and Cortex AI Functions are listed as coming soon, so the breadth of the rollout is staged rather than simultaneous.

According to the article, Anthropic reports a 70.6% score on Terminal-Bench 4.0 for Sonnet 5.5, nearly a 7x improvement compared with 10.3% for Sonnet 5, plus performance nearly level with Opus 5.5 on GDPval-AA and more than 30% faster output than Sonnet 5. Snowflake frames these as reasons the model suits well-scoped coding tasks, polished documents, slides and spreadsheets, chart reading, and latency-sensitive workflows, while steering complex, open-ended work toward Opus 5.5.

The practical question is likely to be whether these reported gains translate into a given team's own workflows, since the benchmark figures come from Anthropic rather than from independent testing. For data and development teams already governed inside Snowflake, the more consequential detail may be how quickly the CoWork, CoCo, Cortex Agents and Cortex AI Functions integrations arrive, rather than the model's headline scores.