Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents
Which summary reads better? Pick one — models revealed after.Both summaries are AI-generated.
Claude Sonnet 5 launches at $2/M input and $10/M output tokens through August 31, rising to $3/M and $15/M, with agentic coding benchmark performance closer to Opus 4.8 than Sonnet 4.6. For production agent stacks, this makes midsize-model routing viable for browser/terminal/tool workflows that previously needed top-tier models, while keeping Opus reserved for the highest-accuracy paths.
Sonnet 5 delivers roughly Opus 4.8-level agentic performance (63.2% vs 69.2% on agentic coding, and matching or beating it on knowledge work) at $2/$10 per million tokens through August 31, then $3/$15 — undercutting Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, though still pricier than Gemini 3.5 Flash. If you're running multi-step agents, you can likely downgrade Opus-tier workloads to Sonnet 5 and cut spend substantially while gaining better prompt-injection resistance and lower hallucination rates; reserve Opus only for the hardest judgment-call and deep-research tasks.