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

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.