Anthropic released a new artificial intelligence model called Sonnet 5.5 on Monday, marking the company's second launch since CEO Amodei called for slowing the pace of development.

Sonnet 5.5 is a faster, lower-cost product from Anthropic, and the company says it outperforms its predecessor in coding, completing well-defined tasks, and creating polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets.

The release comes less than a week after Anthropic introduced the more expensive Opus 5.5, and the company also said Monday that Haiku 5.5, the cheapest in the lineup, is coming soon.

Theo Chu, a research product manager at Anthropic, said in an interview: "Sonnet is really aimed at cost-conscious customers who may not need that level of intelligence. It might be used for routine tasks that only require execution but don't need the kind of judgment that Opus can bring."

In recent weeks, as more researchers warn that AI could cause catastrophic harm, Anthropic and its competitors have come under intense scrutiny over their safety and security practices.

In response, Amodei urged AI companies earlier this month to slow the pace of improving their most advanced models, a move that stunned the tech world and government officials.

The company said Monday that Sonnet 5.5 does not push the frontier of its model capabilities, so most of its alignment testing focused on "a targeted set of risks applicable to models at any capability level," according to a blog post.

In the AI industry, an aligned model is one whose behavior is consistent with human interests and values.

However, Anthropic said Sonnet 5.5 has a "significant improvement" in cybersecurity capabilities over its predecessor, making it the first Sonnet model to launch with similar fallback protections and cybersecurity measures that Anthropic developed for its most capable models.

Chu said: "From the very beginning, focusing on alignment and safety has been a key part of our mission. This has always been a priority for all of our models."

Sonnet 5.5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, half the price of Opus 5.5.

Anthropic said Sonnet 5.5 also requires fewer tokens per task than the previous version, making it cheaper to run.

The model is available on all platforms as of Monday, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.