Anthropic Launches Claude Sonnet 5 With Near-Opus Performance at 60% Lower Cost
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026, positioning it as its most capable mid-tier model to date, with agentic abilities previously reserved for the higher-end Opus 4.8. The model is priced at an introductory rate of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, making it significantly cheaper than both Opus 4.8 and competing models from OpenAI and Google. Benchmark results show Sonnet 5 closing the gap with Opus 4.8 substantially, trailing by just 2.3% on Terminal-Bench and 0.5% on Humanity's Last Exam, while even surpassing Opus 4.8 on the GDPval-AA v2 knowledge-work benchmark. Early users at platforms like Cursor and Zapier report that the model reliably completes multi-step workflows end-to-end without stalling midway, a key improvement over its predecessor. The introductory pricing is set to expire on August 31, 2026, after which rates will rise to $3 and $15 per million tokens respectively.
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