Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 Offers 60% Cost Cut Over Opus 4.8 Until August 31
Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026, making it broadly available across all Claude tiers, Claude Code, and the API, with GitHub simultaneously rolling it out in Copilot. During an introductory period running through August 31, the model is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, compared to Opus 4.8's $5 and $25 respectively — a 60% discount. After August 31, pricing rises to $3/$15, still 40% cheaper than Opus 4.8, making it a persistently lower-cost option for high-volume workloads. Analysts note that while Sonnet 5 can match Opus 4.8 on some higher-effort tasks, it is not a universal replacement and is better suited as a first-pass model with Opus reserved for escalation. The pricing difference is particularly significant for teams running coding agents at scale, where output-heavy workflows can translate into hundreds of dollars in monthly savings.
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