Anthropic just made its workhorse AI dramatically faster without raising the price. Sonnet 5.5 was just released.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 is 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5, typically uses fewer tokens to finish the same job, and Anthropic says that can cut the actual cost of completing a task by as much as 30%.

And this isn't simply a speed update.

Here’s the real story:

Sonnet has become Anthropic’s everyday work model, sitting below Opus for the hardest problems. With 5.5, the gap between those tiers is getting surprisingly small.

Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 now performs close to Opus 5.5 on several evaluations covering coding, knowledge work, computer use, and visual understanding. On its agentic coding benchmark, Sonnet jumped from 10.3% to 70.6%.

The bigger story may be efficiency.

Pricing stays at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, but Sonnet 5.5 needs fewer tokens and fewer steps to accomplish many tasks. Anthropic says that makes it up to 30% cheaper per task even though the token price hasn't changed.

It’s also being positioned beyond coding. Anthropic specifically calls out polished documents, presentations, spreadsheets, UI design, long-running tasks, and everyday knowledge work as strengths.

That may be where the AI model race is heading next.

The next breakthrough isn't just smarter AI. It's getting near-frontier intelligence faster, cheaper, and into the everyday workflows people actually use.