Anthropic Releases Claude Sonnet 5.5: 30% Faster and Up to 30% Cheaper

My take: Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, and the interesting part isn't just that it's faster: it costs up to 30% less to do the same work, even though the price per token stayed the same as Sonnet 5. The difference is that it needs fewer steps to get to the result.

This is exactly the kind of improvement that matters most to people who use AI every day to get work done, not to impress anyone. Zendesk said it's now resolving support tickets 20% faster, and Atlassian reported its teams run their agents (Rovo Agents) up to 30% faster with this model. Those are real examples from companies already using it, not a promise.

For a business paying for AI tokens every month, that translates directly to the bottom line: same task, lower cost. And for someone who builds with AI (like I do with my projects), it means that fast, affordable model you used to save for simple tasks can now handle more serious work.

If you're already using AI at work, have you checked how much it's actually costing you per task, or are you only looking at the price per token without noticing how many steps it needs to finish the job?