Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 5: Key Differences, Costs, and When to Use Each
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026, followed by Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, with both models targeting different use cases and price points. Sonnet 5 is designed for high-volume tasks such as content generation, coding, and classification, scoring 72.7% on SWE-bench Verified, while Opus 5 excels at long-horizon agentic work, complex reasoning, and self-verification. On pricing, Sonnet 5 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens at standard rates from September 2026, compared to Opus 5 at $5 input and $25 output. Opus 5 ranked first on Zapier's AutomationBench and recorded the lowest misaligned-behavior score of 2.3 among recent Anthropic releases, making it better suited for high-stakes decisions. Experts recommend defaulting to Sonnet 5 for most workloads and escalating to Opus 5 only where judgment and accuracy outweigh throughput and cost.
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