Anthropic unveils Claude Sonnet 5.5: faster, cheaper and now on the free tier

What was announced

Anthropic introduced Claude Sonnet 5.5, its new mid-tier model. According to the company, it runs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less for most workloads. Pricing stays the same as Sonnet 5.

Highlights

• Same price as Sonnet 5, but the company says it beats it on every benchmark it shared.
• On some coding tasks it performs close to the flagship Opus 5.5.
• Sonnet 5.5 is now the model behind claude.ai's free tier.

Free tier comparison

Moving Sonnet 5.5 to the free tier is notable. OpenAI's ChatGPT free tier uses Luna 5.6, which means Anthropic currently offers a more capable model for free.

A smaller sibling is coming

Anthropic reiterated that Haiku 5.5 will be available "in the coming weeks". How it will be priced is still unclear.