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NerdLevelTech

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 5.5

The speed/intelligence balance most teams should start with

ProprietaryNewReleased: September 28, 2026ValueVerified: October 24, 2026

What it is

Anthropic’s middle tier: the same 1M-token context window as Opus, with output capped at 128K, at half the price, with a high default effort and the fastest latency of the current line-up.

NLT take

If you are not sure which Claude model to build on, start here and only move up when a failing test says so. The gap to Opus shows up on long agent runs, not on the first prompt.

Before you switch

Same price as Sonnet 5 ($2/$10) with better positioning, so there is no reason to pin the older version.

Cost for a real task

The same task on every model: 50,000 input tokens and 10,000 output tokens, at the base tier.

Task cost

$0.20

50K input + 10K output tokens

Input, per 1M
$2.00
Output, per 1M
$10.00
Cached input, per 1M
$0.10

Pricing source: Anthropic pricing

Specs

Maker
Anthropic
Licence
Proprietary
Released
September 28, 2026
Context window
1,000,000 tokens
Max output
128,000 tokens
Knowledge cutoff
June 2026
Input / output
Text · Image → Text

Input and output tokens both count toward the 1M window; output is capped at 128K.

Watch it in action

Hands-on videos from creators we trust. They open on YouTube; we do not host or re-upload them.

From our coverage

Articles about this model or its family. A “Background” tag means we have not covered this exact release yet.

Sources & model links

Every number on this card traces back to one of these links. The maker page proves the positioning, the pricing page proves the rates, the Hugging Face repo proves the weights exist, and the Ollama page proves a local tag.

Official