The company positions it as a faster, lower-cost complement to Opus 5.5 for well-scoped everyday tasks, bug fixing, and document, slide, and spreadsheet creation.
Anthropic reports that Sonnet 5.5 generates outputs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and retains the same listed token prices: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. It says the model typically uses fewer tokens and can cost up to 30% less per task. The company also reports a 70.6% score on Terminal-Bench 4.0, compared with 10.3% for Sonnet 5. These are vendor-reported figures; the supplied source does not provide independent verification.