Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs. Claude Fable 5.1

Claude Sonnet 5.5 is Anthropic’s faster, lower-cost Claude 5.5 model for well-scoped professional work, software development, agentic workflows, and content creation. Anthropic positions it below Claude Opus 5.5 for the most complex open-ended work, but says it can perform comparably on some benchmarks when run at higher effort settings. The model delivers a particularly large improvement in coding, including a 70.6% result on Terminal-Bench 4.0, 46.2% on FrontierCode at Max effort, and 55.5% on CursorBench 4.0. It also scores 1844 on GDPval-AA, 1811 on AA-Briefcase, 64.5% on Humanity’s Last Exam with tools, and 80.1% on OSWorld 2.1 partial. Anthropic reports that Sonnet 5.5 is better at long-horizon work, image understanding, collaboration, and codebase comprehension than Sonnet 5. The company also highlights design-oriented improvements, including the ability to produce polished documents, spreadsheets, slides, and user interfaces with less editing. Sonnet 5.5 generates output more than 30% faster than its predecessor and is Anthropic’s fastest Sonnet model to date. Although its listed token prices are unchanged from Sonnet 5, Anthropic says greater token efficiency can reduce per-task cost by up to 30%. Pricing is $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens, $2.50 per million cache-write tokens, and $0.20 per million cache-read tokens. The model includes cyber safeguards, biology safeguards, reasoning-extraction protections, and preserved-thinking controls, with some higher-risk cyber requests falling back to Sonnet 5. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is available with zero data retention across Claude products, the Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure under the model name claude-sonnet-5-5.

Claude Fable 5.1 is an advanced general-purpose AI model from Anthropic focused on coding, scientific research, knowledge work, business processes, and long-horizon agentic reasoning. It is the generally available counterpart to Claude Mythos 5.1, which uses the same underlying model but is offered with different safeguards for vetted cybersecurity and life sciences users. Compared with Claude Fable 5, Fable 5.1 shows stronger performance across agentic coding, research, computer use, multidisciplinary reasoning, business workflow automation, and other complex benchmarks. The model is designed to remain effective during long-running tasks that involve planning, tool use, repeated verification, code modification, research, and multi-step decision making. In software engineering scenarios, it can investigate difficult bugs, trace problems across large codebases, perform code review, and work through complex implementation tasks with less supervision. Anthropic also positions Fable 5.1 as a stronger research model, with demonstrated capabilities in scientific analysis, computational modeling, and other technically demanding workflows. Improvements to cache-read pricing reduce the cost of reusing previously processed context, making the model more economical for workflows that involve long conversations, large codebases, or repeated tool calls. Fable 5.1 introduces updated enterprise privacy and security options, including Enterprise Frontier Safeguards and zero-data-retention access for eligible customers during the rollout period. Its cybersecurity protections are designed to permit more benign defensive security work, including vulnerability discovery, while continuing to restrict higher-risk activities such as exploit development and certain penetration-testing tasks. The model is available through Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, the Claude API, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure under the claude-fable-5-1 model identifier for API users.