Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 nears Opus 4.8 performance at $2/$10 per million tokens
Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5, a hybrid-reasoning model with adjustable effort levels, as the default model across Free and Pro plans and Claude Code, priced at an introductory $2/$10 per million input/output tokens through August 2026 before rising to $3/$15. The model narrows Sonnet's performance gap with Opus 4.8 on coding and tool-use benchmarks, giving developers frontier-level agentic performance without paying Opus-tier prices.
Source: anthropic.com ↗
Claude Sonnet 5 gives our agents a strong execution layer for multi-step software engineering work.
Early access partner (engineering team)
Why this matters
- → Opus-level agentic performance now costs 33–50% less through 2026.
- → Developers can tackle multi-step automation and tool use without expensive model tiers.
- → Narrower capability gap makes reasoning tasks accessible at mid-market price points.
Agentic performance, half the price