Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5 is 30 percent faster, it says

Anthropic's Sonnet line sits below its Opus model in power, but the company has pitched it as useful in certain circumstances because of its agility. The prior version, Sonnet 5, was announced about three months ago, and its selling point at the time was efficient agentic deployment — running agents at a lower cost than competitors. With Sonnet 5.5, the emphasis has shifted to speed.

Anthropic's benchmarks also show Sonnet 5.5 performing better than Opus 5.5 on agentic coding, likely because of its ability to spawn multiple agents without exceeding cost limits. The company says 5.5 has "comparable" cyber capabilities to Opus 5, making it the first Sonnet model subject to the same cyber safeguards that apply to Fable and Opus.

This release lands amid a flurry of new model launches from major AI labs. OpenAI released several new models just last week, including enhanced versions of Sol and Luna, and Meta announced a new model for an upcoming smart glasses feature. Anthropic's own next move appears to be a new Haiku, its smallest model, planned for the coming weeks.