Claude Sonnet 5.5 reaches AWS and GitHub Copilot on the same day
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readAnthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 became available through two large developer channels on 28 September. AWS announced the model in two forms: through Amazon Bedrock, which keeps data inside AWS infrastructure with regional data residency and adds managed features such as Guardrails and Knowledge Bases, and through Claude Platform on AWS, which gives Anthropic's own platform experience and APIs inside the AWS Console with AWS billing and authentication. A separate AWS announcement covers availability in the GovCloud (US) regions.
AWS describes Sonnet 5.5 as a step up from Sonnet 5 at a lower cost per task for most work, stronger on well-scoped coding tasks such as building and fixing features and verifying output against requirements, and on knowledge work such as one-page documents, diagrams and spreadsheet clean-up.
GitHub made the model generally available in Copilot the same day, for Pro, Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise users, with a gradual rollout. GitHub says that in its early testing Sonnet 5.5 matched Sonnet 5 on coding tasks while using significantly fewer steps, tokens and tool calls, and finished noticeably faster. It is billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing. Under Copilot's default model enablement, new models are switched on automatically unless an administrator has turned off the global default or disabled this model.
What it means
For teams on Bedrock, the choice is now between two ways of calling the same model: AWS-managed features and data residency, or Anthropic's native platform with AWS billing. For Copilot administrators the practical point is the default: the model appears for users unless someone turns it off, and because it is billed per use, a model that uses fewer tokens per task changes the bill as well as the speed.