Announcing Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Snowflake Cortex AI

Claude Sonnet 5.5, Anthropic’s most capable Sonnet model yet, is coming to Snowflake Cortex AI in public preview. At launch, it will be available through Cortex Inference, so teams can use it for analysis and application development while keeping their data within Snowflake’s security and governance perimeter. Support in Snowflake CoWork, Snowflake CoCo, Cortex Agents and Cortex AI Functions is coming soon.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 #

Claude Sonnet 5.5 is a clear upgrade over Sonnet 5 for well-scoped everyday tasks, bug fixes, and polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets. Anthropic reports a 70.6% score on Terminal-Bench 4.0, representing almost a 7x improvement compared with 10.3% for Sonnet 5. It also performs nearly level with Opus 5.5 on GDPval-AA, a benchmark covering real-world work across 44 occupations, and improves substantially on chart recognition and computer use.

Anthropic positions Sonnet 5.5 as a faster complement to Opus 5.5. Opus 5.5 remains the better choice for complex, open-ended work that requires sustained judgment, while Sonnet 5.5 is optimal on well-scoped tasks where speed matters. Anthropic reports that it generates output more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5, making it a good fit for quick iteration and high-throughput work.

Workloads that fit Sonnet 5.5 well include:

• Well-scoped coding tasks such as fixing bugs, understanding an unfamiliar codebase, and making targeted changes.
• Creating polished documents, slide decks, and spreadsheets, including following an existing template.
• Everyday knowledge work across business functions, where Anthropic reports performance nearly level with Opus 5.5 on GDPval-AA.
• Reading charts and other visual inputs, where it improves substantially on Sonnet 5.
• Interactive and latency-sensitive workflows that benefit from faster responses.

For complex, open-ended work that requires sustained judgment, teams should evaluate Opus 5.5 as well.

Source: Anthropic, Introducing Claude Sonnet 5.5 Sep 28, 2026

What you can do with Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Snowflake #

Sonnet 5.5 gives developers and data teams a faster model for well-scoped, multi-step work inside Snowflake's security and governance perimeter. With Claude Sonnet 5.5, you can:

• Speed up development with Snowflake CoCo (coming soon): Snowflake's AI coding agent understands your enterprise data, governance policies and workflows, enabling teams to go from idea to production quickly without breaking trust or impacting scale. Now, with Sonnet 5.5, CoCo enables improved reasoning, code generation, support for more complex, long-running tasks and agentic execution, bringing secure, Snowflake-aware assistance directly into the CoCo desktop, Snowsight interface, the CLI and local dev tools. For data engineers, analysts and builders, Sonnet 5.5 is especially strong at turning a broad product idea into a working first version, it can research unfamiliar domains, structure the application, implement the core interactions, and continue refining the result through several rounds of feedback.

• Build advanced personal work agents with Snowflake CoWork (coming soon): Snowflake CoWork is the personal work agent for every knowledge worker. From Day 1, it understands your data and your work, answering difficult "why" questions with cited research and running tasks on demand, on schedule and across the tools your business already uses. Every knowledge worker can reason deeply over all your enterprise data, automate routine work and move faster from idea to decision to action. Sonnet 5.5 on Cortex AI is built for long-running agents, sustaining complex, multi-step tasks across many steps and checking its own work as it goes, so CoWork can carry a project from research through action with greater consistency and less supervision, all optimized with Snowflake's security, governance, and context. With Deep Research, proactive automations, reusable User Skills, MCP connectors for Gmail, Jira, Slack and Salesforce and a native mobile app that puts your work agent wherever you are, all inside Snowflake's governance perimeter, every knowledge worker spends less time searching, waiting and coordinating, and more time making the decisions that move the business forward.

• Analyze structured and unstructured data in SQL (coming soon): Cortex AI Functions make it easy to build scalable AI pipelines across multimodal enterprise data using SQL. With the AI_COMPLETE function, analysts can apply natural language instructions directly in SQL. For example, you can ask Sonnet 5.5 to compare a written claim with the underlying numbers and identify where the evidence does not support it:

WITH source_data AS (
  SELECT 'Prior-year revenue was $100 million. Current-year revenue was $120 million. Management says revenue grew 25%.' AS commentary
)
SELECT AI_COMPLETE(
  'claude-sonnet-5-5',
  PROMPT(
    'Review the commentary below. Identify each supported, contradicted, or unsupported claim, and show the calculation used: {0}',
    commentary
  )
) AS financial_review
FROM source_data;

• Build AI applications with Cortex Inference: Call Sonnet 5.5 from your applications through your Snowflake account endpoint. Developers can use the Anthropic SDK with Snowflake's Cortex endpoint, following the call shape shown below. Support for Sonnet 5.5 in Cortex Agents is coming soon.

import os

import anthropic
import httpx

token = os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_PAT"]
account_url = os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_ACCOUNT_URL"].rstrip("/")

with httpx.Client(headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"}) as http_client:
    client = anthropic.Anthropic(
        api_key="not-used",  # Required by the SDK; Snowflake uses the Bearer token
        base_url=f"{account_url}/api/v2/cortex",
        http_client=http_client,
        default_headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"},
    )
    response = client.messages.create(
        model="claude-sonnet-5-5",
        max_tokens=8192,
        messages=[{
            "role": "user",
            "content": (
                "Draft a concise release note for a new feature. "
                "Separate verified facts from assumptions and list "
                "anything that still needs confirmation."
            ),
        }],
    )
    for block in response.content:
        if block.type == "text":
            print(block.text)

Claude Sonnet 5.5 gives teams a faster option for everyday coding, analysis, and document work in applications built with Cortex Inference. Get started by calling the model through your Snowflake account endpoint. Support is coming soon to Cortex AI Functions, CoCo Desktop, CoWork, and Cortex Agents.

Learn more #

• Build agentic applications with Cortex Agents: Get started withCortex Agents and learn how to build AI experiences grounded in your enterprise data.
• Get started with Snowflake CoWork: Learn more aboutSnowflake CoWork and try it out with ourgetting started guide .
• Start building with Snowflake CoCo: Learn more aboutSnowflake CoCo and get hands-on with theCoCo Desktop getting started guide .

Forward-looking statements

_{This article contains forward-looking statements, including about our future product offerings, and are not commitments to deliver any product offerings. Actual results and offerings may differ and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties. See our latest 10-Q for more information.}