As the AI model wars continue, Anthropic has released the newest version of Sonnet, the company's mid-tier model, which it says will work much faster (and for significantly less) than its predecessor. 5.5's predecessor, Sonnet 5, was announced about three months ago. At the time, the model's selling point was efficient agentic deployment ' the ability to run agents at a lower cost than competitors. In the Anthropic hierarchy of models, Sonnet is less powerful than the Opus model, but can be more useful in certain circumstances because its agility. In particular, Anthropic's benchmarks show Sonnet 5.5 performing better than Opus 5.5 on agentic coding, likely because of its ability to spawn multiple agents without exceeding cost limits. Sonnet 5.5 is also said to have significant cyber capabilities, with the company claiming that it has 'comparable' cyber capabilities to Opus 5. As a result, Anthropic says that 5.5 is the first Sonnet model that will be subject the same cyber...
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