Anthropic launches cheaper AI model, its second release since CEO's call for a slowdown

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaks during the keynote address at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on Sept. 15, 2026 in San Francisco, California.

Benjamin Fanjoy | Getty Images

Anthropic on Monday released a new artificial intelligence model called Sonnet 5.5, the company's second launch since CEO Dario Amodei called to slow down the pace of development.

Sonnet 5.5 is a faster, lower-cost offering from Anthropic, and the company said it is better at coding, completing scoped tasks and creating polished documents, slides and spreadsheets than its predecessor. The launch comes less than one week after Anthropic introduced Opus 5.5, a more expensive model, and it said Monday that Haiku 5.5, the cheapest offering in the suite, is coming soon.   

"Sonnet is really for the cost-conscious customer where they might not need as much intelligence," Theo Chu, a research product manager at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview. "It might be routine tasks that just need execution, but don't need that judgment that Opus can bring." 

Anthropic's safety and security practices, as well as those of its competitors, have been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks after a growing chorus of researchers warned about AI's potential to cause catastrophic harm. In response, Amodei stunned the tech sector and government officials earlier this month by urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. 

The company said Monday that Sonnet 5.5 doesn't advance the frontier of its models' capabilities, so most of its alignment testing focused on a "targeted set of risks that apply to models of any capability level," according to a blog post. In the AI industry, an aligned model is one that behaves in accordance with human interests and values. 

"Focusing on alignment and safety has been a key part of our mission from the very beginning," Chu said. "This is something that we've always prioritized across our models."

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