Claude Sonnet 5.5 ships 30%+ faster and up to 30% cheaper at $2/$10 per million tokens

Sonnet 5.5 is Anthropic's main mid-tier model, and the update focuses on speed and price. According to Anthropic and SiliconANGLE, it runs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less for most workloads. Reuters reported pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Anthropic positions it as the fast, economical counterpart to Opus 5.5, which handles complex work that needs careful judgment. Anthropic's launch post drew nearly 12K likes on X.

Community demos are already showing what it can do. A r/singularity post with 279 upvotes showed "VoxelCraft," described as a full-parity Minecraft 1.16 survival clone generated from a single prompt with "Claude 5.5 ultracode." The source does not say whether that was Sonnet or Opus. Anthropic also expanded Bedrock in-country inference in India for Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5, which matters for data-residency requirements.

Competitive context: Sonnet 5.5 launched into a week focused on price-performance:

- OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol claims Astra-level coding at about a fifth of the cost.

- Google's Argon is reported at an "industry-low" price.

- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash leads OpenRouter volume at $1.20 per million output tokens.

The mid-tier has become the main competitive battleground. Anthropic's IPO filing, the same week, adds pressure to show revenue growth.

Not all reaction is positive. An r/Anthropic thread, "Anthropic just lost me because of ID verification" (200 upvotes), shows friction over new account checks. Developers also note GLM-5.3 undercuts Claude API pricing substantially. Independent benchmarks of Sonnet 5.5 against Sol were not in the sources.