Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 today. If you’re wanting a good daily use model then this might be for you. Claude Sonnet 5.5 comes hand in hand with Claude Opus 5.5 as a daily use model for the 5.5 family. You would want to use Claude Opus 5.5 if your task requires lots of research or decision making but Claude Sonnet 5.5 is built for day to day coding. Coding is a great use case for Claude Sonnet 5.5 because you can use it to help you write code, fix bugs, process data and create clean spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations all in no time.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is much faster than its predecessor. Not only that it’s cheaper to run. You will see that the input/output token price stays the same at $2/million input tokens and $10/million output tokens. But since Claude Sonnet 5.5 outputs information more efficiently you will be paying less for it. In some cases up to 30% less for completed tasks. Claude Sonnet 5.5 also has an increased output speed of over 30% so you’ll feel the snappyness when going back and forth.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 excels at coding. It saw a large increase in it’s agentic coding benchmarks. From 10.3% to 70.6% on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 test which tests how a model performs when given terminal commands. On CursorBench which gives you a variety of messy files to solve. It was able to score almost as high as flagships. Many developers have noticed that Claude Sonnet 5.5 will make better decisions when building and ask less dumb questions. Claude Sonnet 5.5 was even able to beat Pokemon red using image understanding. Which is a big deal for long horizon tasks.
When it comes to non coding tasks Claude Sonnet 5.5 is more enjoyable to converse with. It has gotten rid of many quirks that were seen in past models and is able to write more natural responses. Another thing I like about Claude Sonnet 5.5 is its vision. It can take your earnings report or any document and input it into your powerpoint slides. Reviewers have said it looks good enough to send to your client. Claude Sonnet 5.5 also comes with cyber security features similar to what you find on Claude Opus. So you can rest assured your coding isn’t putting you at risk.
Why You Should Care
Claude Sonnet 5.5 offers almost the same performance as flagships. At a cheaper rate and faster speed. Whether you’re coding and need help with larger projects or need help with business tasks you should try Claude Sonnet 5.5.