Key Points
- Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30 as the default model for Free and Pro.
- Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
- Standard pricing rises to $3 input and $15 output after August 31.
- Anthropic says it performs close to Opus 4.8 at lower cost.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, making it the default model for Claude's Free and Pro tiers and rolling it out to Max, Team, Enterprise, Claude Code, and the API, the company said.
The model is priced at an introductory $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, rising to $3 and $15 after that. Anthropic says Sonnet 5 improves on February's Sonnet 4.6 in reasoning, tool use, coding, and knowledge work, with lower hallucination rates and stronger resistance to prompt injection, and that it performs close to its more expensive models at a fraction of the cost.
The pitch is agent economics. Sonnet 5 is built to plan, browse, and run terminals autonomously — the workloads that used to demand the priciest models — at a price TechCrunch notes undercuts Opus 4.8, OpenAI's GPT-5.5, and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro. For a company that just passed OpenAI in valuation on the strength of enterprise demand, the bet is that the money in agents is in volume, not the top of the model stack — the same logic behind making its 1-million-token context window free.
Anthropic moved the top of its lineup again just over three weeks later, when it launched Claude Opus 5 as the new default model on Claude Max, leaving Sonnet 5 in place as the default for Free and Pro.
Source: Anthropic, TechCrunch.
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