Daily AI news, sourcedOfficial news, first rumor reports and substantive progress. Each entry keeps the information published at that time.
- Claude can now help build evaluations and hillclimb on them
Anthropic's Claude Devs account announced Claude can now help developers build evaluations and hillclimb on them.
- Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5, 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5 at the same price
Anthropic says Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family, generates output more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less per task for most work, at the same $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Anthropic says it scores 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, versus 10.3% for Sonnet 5, and lands two points below Opus 5.5 on GDPval-AA. It is available now, including on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and on the Claude Platform as claude-sonnet-5-5, and Claude Haiku 5.5 is due in the coming weeks.
- Claude Code 2.1.284 makes Sonnet 5.5 the default model
Claude Code v2.1.284 adds Claude Sonnet 5.5 (claude-sonnet-5-5) as the default Sonnet model on the Anthropic API, per the GitHub release notes. The release notes list 1M context for the model at $2/$10 per million tokens with $0.20 per million cache reads.
- Claude Opus 5.5 is now available
Claude Opus 5.5 is now available, per Anthropic's site. AWS's Kiro team describes it as Anthropic's most capable Opus model yet, delivering Fable 5.1-level performance on most work at 40% lower cost.
- Epic Games' Unreal Engine skills plugin lets Claude Code control Unreal Editor over MCP
Epic Games' Unreal Engine Skills for Claude Code plugin, listed in Anthropic's official Claude Code plugin marketplace, connects Claude Code to Unreal Editor through the Model Context Protocol. It exposes hundreds of tools across more than 30 toolsets, including actors, Blueprints, materials, Niagara, Control Rigs, Sequencer, State Trees, widgets, the Gameplay Ability System and automation testing, and adds an unreal-mcp skill plus a session hook that tells Claude it is in an Unreal project. It requires Unreal Editor running with the ModelContextProtocol and AllToolsets plugins enabled and the MCP server started. The plugin repo has been public since June and was last updated on Sep 17.