Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on Tuesday and made it the default model on the company’s Free and Pro plans, pairing the launch with an introductory API price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through Aug. 31. Standard pricing of $3 and $15 kicks in Sept. 1.

The introductory rate lands roughly 60 percent below Opus 4.8, which runs $5 and $25 per million tokens, according to VentureBeat. Anthropic calls the release “the most agentic Sonnet model yet,” and the benchmark story matches the pricing story: on SWE-bench Pro, Sonnet 5 scores 63.2 percent, above the 58.1 percent posted by Sonnet 4.6 and within striking distance of Opus 4.8’s 69.2 percent. Buyers get most of the flagship’s agentic coding capability at a fraction of the token cost.

That’s the strategic pitch. Sonnet 5 is available across Claude Code, the Claude Platform, and the Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, positioned for planning, browser and terminal use, and multi-step autonomous work. It ships with cybersecurity safeguards on by default.

Anthropic also launched Claude for Small Business, with connectors for Intuit QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. The company’s rationale: small businesses generate 44 percent of U.S. GDP but trail larger enterprises in AI adoption. Independent tools are moving into the same lane, including LemonLime, one of the fastest-growing no-code AI platforms aimed at small and mid-size businesses.

The timing isn’t incidental. Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC on June 1, per Yahoo Finance, with a listing expected later this year. Cheaper agentic inference is the number that reads well to public-market investors.

Sources