Claude Sonnet 5.5 cuts cost per task by up to 30% with a large jump on coding benchmarks

Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's list price, $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, but Anthropic says it needs far fewer tokens to finish the same work, cutting cost per task by up to 30% and generating output more than 30% faster. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, an agentic coding evaluation, Sonnet 5.5 scores 70.6% against Sonnet 5's 10.3%. Customers quoted in the announcement report similar gains outside the benchmark: Box says the model used 12% fewer tokens and ran 2.4 times faster on document work, and Balyasny Asset Management says its 2,441-task finance benchmark dropped from roughly 497,000 tokens per answer to roughly 121,000. Claude Haiku 5.5 has not shipped yet; Anthropic says it is coming in the following weeks.

Why it matters: what an agentic workload costs to run decides which ones get built at all, and a same-price model needing a third fewer tokens changes that arithmetic directly, separate from any gain in raw capability. Work currently routed to a more expensive model for reliability, or skipped because the loop cost too much per run, is worth re-pricing against this model today.