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Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 5.5, Delivering Opus-Class Performance at Half the Cost

September 28, 2026 at 22:16 EDT

Foundation Models

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, 2026, positioning the model as a cost-effective alternative to its flagship Opus 5.5 while delivering dramatically improved coding capabilities. The new model maintains Sonnet 5's pricing at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens—exactly half of Opus 5.5's rates—while generating output over 30% faster and reducing per-task costs by up to 30% through more efficient token usage.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2026 · ANTHROPIC

Sonnet 5.5 Matches Opus, Costs Half

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 with dramatic coding improvements and pricing half that of Opus 5.5, making frontier-class performance available at mainstream cost.

70.6%

Coding benchmark (Terminal-Bench 4.0)

6.9×

Higher than Sonnet 5 (was 10.3%)

50%

Lower token pricing vs Opus 5.5

30%

Faster output generation

Coding Leap
Sonnet 5.5 jumps to 70.6% on agentic coding tasks, nearly closing the gap to Opus 5.5's 66.4% and demolishing Sonnet 5's 10.3%. Early demos show real-time 3D graphics, game logic, and content generation—all built through natural language prompts alone.

Practical Efficiency
Real-world deployments report 20% faster support-ticket processing, 33% fewer tool calls in coding workflows, and 14% lower token consumption on standard benchmarks—gains that translate directly to lower per-task costs when deployed at Medium or Low effort.

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