📜 Anthropic just shipped Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family — and it's a bigger jump than the ".5" in the name suggests. Here's what actually changed and what it means if you're building with Claude Code. ⚓ What's New - Sonnet 5.5 is the everyday workhorse: bug fixes, spreadsheets, documents, well-scoped coding tasks — the faster, cheaper complement to Claude Opus 5.5. - Speed: 30%+ faster output than Sonnet 5. Anthropic calls it the fastest Sonnet yet. - Cost: per-token pricing is unchanged ($2/million input tokens, $10/million output, $0.20/million cache reads) but it burns far fewer tokens to finish the same work — Anthropic says that nets out to up to 30% cheaper in practice. - Coding jump: 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (agentic coding), up from Sonnet 5's 10.3% — one of the bigger single-version jumps on that benchmark. - Knowledge work: scores 1844 on GDPval-AA v2.1, basically matching Opus 5.5's 1846. - Writing and design got a real bump too — clearer prose, better UI and document polish. ——— ⚓ Where You Can Use It - Live now via the API as model ID claude-sonnet-5-5, plus AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure — and rolling into Claude Code and the Claude apps model picker. - Zero data retention is supported across all of those deployments for anyone who needs it. - Claude Haiku 5.5 is coming in the next few weeks to round out the 5.5 family. ——— ☠️ Watch Out - Sonnet 5.5 is the first Sonnet to ship with cybersecurity safeguards. A narrow set of higher-risk cybersecurity requests get auto-switched mid-conversation to the older Sonnet 5 model (or blocked outright) — routine bug-fixing isn't affected. - If your conversation gets switched, it'll be visible in the thread. Editing your earlier message before retrying usually stops it from happening again, since the safeguard re-triggers on the same request content. - Legit security researchers and cyberdefenders can apply for deeper access through Anthropic's new Cyber Verification Program.

You may have this to claim on your account as well. Luckily for me, just before I started a big project, I saw it.

When we spoke on the call yesterday I gave the wrong cost for this model. I opted for the next level up so I could dispatch research agents in this mode: "Goal mode, where agents autonomously work until completion"

https://lnkd.in/p/gTnTXdY9

I started the newsletter build on 5 June, and as of today I have 762 sub. I made my first ad revenue - $80 - two days ago. I think people are hungry for local information hubs that pull 50 facebook groups together without the facebook bs that goes with them, all into one place. I'll talk more about this build and what I did, but it started with a tweet that I copy and pasted into claude code. __________________________ Can you build this project out in a folder? I'd use substack. Call it the Barrhaven Bugle. Confirm spelling. Task second brain, researching the idea to flesh it out and save findings. If I had to start one AI side hustle in 2026, this would be it: a local newsletter that pulls in 2k a month and runs entirely by a team of four AI agents. The founder (Lucas Walter) has never written a single edition. This is a copy-pasteable system that could be applied to any city in the world. Here's the agent setup: 1. A growth engineer agent scrapes every local news site, subReddit, and event calendar at 6:00 a.m. daily. 2. A content director reads the database and writes the weekly newsletter in his voice every week. 3. A sales director handles every inbound advertiser email back-and-forth, pitching AI-generated ad creative. 4. A CEO agent orchestrates all three and reports back to him. Results from Lucas's newsletter: Spokane Pulse, 7,400 subscribers, 47.5% open rate (industry average 20% to 30%), 11% click-through rate, 2k a month in ad revenue, and growing under 4 hours a week of human in the loop. Now imagine running the same system in your city. I link to the Spokane Pulse in the comments so you can check it out for yourself. ___________________________ From that tweet I just started building it out. Now I ultimately ended up with a different system than this. That looks much like a news aggregator. I do have seven Hermes agents doing it. I am pushing out five-question interviews to people by email and building features. I've added a cartoon daily, a crossword, and a swipe deck pulse.