human on Monday released a new artificial intelligence model called Sonet 5.5. This is the company’s second release since CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in the pace of development.
Sonnet 5.5 is Anthropic’s faster, lower-cost product, and the company says it’s better at coding, performing scoped tasks, and creating polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets than previous versions. The announcement comes less than a week after Anthropic announced its more expensive model, the Opus 5.5, and on Monday announced that the cheapest product in the suite, the Haiku 5.5, is coming soon.
“Sonnet is really for cost-conscious customers who don’t need a lot of intelligence,” Theo Chu, research product manager at Anthropic, said in an interview with CNBC. “It may be a routine task that just needs to be performed, but without the judgment that Opus brings.”
Anthropic’s safety and security efforts, as well as those of its competitors, have come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks as researchers increasingly warn about the potential for AI to cause catastrophic harm. In response, Amodei surprised tech industry and government officials earlier this month by asking AI companies to slow down the pace at which they improve their cutting-edge models.
The company said Monday that because Sonnet 5.5 does not advance the feature front of its models, most of its calibration testing focused on “a targeted set of risks that apply to models at all feature levels,” according to a blog post. In the AI industry, a consistent model is one that operates in accordance with human interests and values.
However, Anthropic said the Sonnet 5.5 has “significantly improved” cybersecurity features over the previous generation and is the first Sonnet model to launch with fallback and cyber protection features similar to those developed by Anthropic for its most capable models.
“Focusing on coordination and safety has been a key part of our mission from the beginning,” Chu said. “This is something we have always prioritized throughout our model.”
Sonnet 5.5 is available for $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, half the price of Opus 5.5. According to Anthropic, Sonnet 5.5 also requires fewer tokens per task than previous versions, making it cheaper to run.
This model will be available on all platforms on Monday. Amazon web services, google cloud and microsoft Azure.
