Is there a good use case? This isn't like Luna where it's much cheaper/effective just to use Luna in certain situations.
But Sonnet 5.5 at medium and below gives you a cheaper option at a performance worse than the lowest thinking Opus (low), which may be viable for "low intelligence" use cases.
Their new Ember-1 model is pretty good, fine-tune of Kimi3 with way less thinking
Does this make it an American model or is it still Chinese? Does it matter?
With that said, at that point, I'd probably use something like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, which is way faster and significantly cheaper, and probably not noticeably dumber for most use cases.
i think they see what openai charges for luna and just don't want to try and compete
Ultimately it's slightly ridiculous to define model capability on a single axis. It's like a standardized test. Sure, you can line people up by their ACT score, but that doesn't mean a doctor and a brilliant artist who both do well on the ACT have an identical intelligence or approach to life. It just can't be captured.
This screams to be that Sol vs Terra model problem that OpenAI had. On paper half the price, in actual usage the price gap was so close for less good results, that everybody just spammed Sol.
Maybe it's buried within their system card but I think that this would be one of the first things they'd want to show in the announcement article and they fail to do so.
I really don't know who does Anthropic's marketing but they always seem to a pretty terrible job in their announcements from my perspective.