Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic’s new Claude Sonnet 5.5 is faster, cheaper, and now powers the free Claude.ai tier, beating OpenAI’s free model.
Why Now
Anthropic released Sonnet 5.5 today, claiming 30%+ speed and cost gains over Sonnet 5 and outperforming benchmarks.
What Happened
Sonnet 5.5 runs 30%+ faster and costs up to 30% less for most work, priced the same as Sonnet 5. It outperforms Sonnet 5 on every benchmark and is cheaper to run. The model is now used for the free tier on claude.ai, while OpenAI’s free tier uses Luna 5.6.
Why It Matters
A faster, cheaper model on the free tier gives developers and hobbyists better access to high‑quality LLMs without paying. It raises the bar for free offerings and could shift user preference toward Anthropic for cost‑sensitive workloads.
The Limitation
The article cites anecdotal benchmarks and a single coding task; broader performance across diverse workloads is not yet verified.
What You Can Do
Try building a WebGL pelican demo on the free Claude.ai tier to compare performance with OpenAI’s free tier.
Source
Read original sourceWhy we picked this
New Anthropic model release with performance and cost claims – core AI content.