Anthropic cuts Sonnet 5.5 cache-read price by half

Sole source: Anthropic. The company says its Claude Sonnet 5.5 model halves the price of reading cached material compared with Sonnet 5. Cache reads cost $0.10 per million tokens, down from $0.20; ordinary input and output prices remain unchanged. The company says the model also typically uses fewer tokens to do the same work.

Tokens are units used to measure the text a model processes or generates. A cache stores material for reuse, so the lower rate applies when that stored material is read again. Anthropic says its own tests found Sonnet 5.5 cost up to 30% less per task than its predecessor; that is separate from the fixed reduction in the cache-read rate.

Costs depend on the task and settings

The company positions the model for defined everyday tasks such as fixing bugs and making documents, slides and spreadsheets. It presents Sonnet 5.5 as a faster, lower-cost complement to Opus 5.5, which it says remains stronger at complex, open-ended work requiring sustained judgment.

In Anthropic’s evaluations, Terminal-Bench tests coding tasks and GDPval-AA tests work across 44 occupations and nine major industries. The company cautions that benchmark scores capture only one aspect of a model’s capabilities.