Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic’s new Sonnet is faster and cheaper than Sonnet 5, and it is now powering Claude’s free tier.
Willison says Anthropic claims Sonnet 5.5 runs more than 30% faster and costs up to 30% less for most work, while beating Sonnet 5 across benchmarks. His test still hit the same “max” thinking-effort failure he saw with Opus 5.5, burning 128,000 tokens without producing an SVG. At lower effort, it produced a WebGL pelican-on-a-bicycle page he called a solid effort. Simon Willison's note
Willison says Anthropic claims Sonnet 5.5 runs more than 30% faster and costs up to 30% less for most work, while beating Sonnet 5 across benchmarks. His test still hit the same “max” thinking-effort failure he saw with Opus 5.5, burning 128,000 tokens without producing an SVG. At lower effort, it produced a WebGL pelican-on-a-bicycle page he called a solid effort. Simon Willison's note
score 8