Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 brings stronger agentic capabilities, lower pricing, and improved safety, positioning the model as a cheaper alternative to Opus, GPT-5. As shipping agentic capabilities becomes table stakes among foundation model companies, Anthropic is releasing Claude Sonnet 5, a more powerful and agentic version of the lab's midsize model. "It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models," Anthropic said in a blog post .
Key Takeaways
- That framing mirrors what OpenAI and Google have said about their own recent releases.
6 Sol was launched in preview last week, and it is also the firm's most agentic model yet, allowing users to split work across subagents for longer autonomous tasks.
- At launch, Sonnet 5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which the price will jump to $3 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
- 2% on agentic coding, compared to Opus 4.
On a knowledge work benchmark, Sonnet 5 actually slightly outperforms Opus 4.
- " "We handed Claude Sonnet 5 a two-part job - update Salesforce account tiers, send a launch announcement to enterprise contacts - and it finished end to end," Daniel Shepard, a senior engineer at Zapier, said in a statement.
- "Evaluations also show that it has a much lower ability to perform dangerous cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models," reads the blog post.
Stats & Key Facts
- #At launch, Sonnet 5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which the price will jump to $3 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
- #For example, on one benchmark, Sonnet 5 scores a 63.
That framing mirrors what OpenAI and Google have said about their own recent releases. 6 Sol was launched in preview last week, and it is also the firm's most agentic model yet, allowing users to split work across subagents for longer autonomous tasks. 5 Flash , which launched in May, was pitched as a shift from a conversational chatbot to an agentic tool that plans, builds, and iterates on real work with minimal human input.
Sonnet 5's pitch is confirmation that agentic capability is the new baseline expectation at every price tier. Now the differentiator isn't going to be who can do agentic work best, but how cheaply they can do it and how reliably without human oversight. Sonnet 5 promises performance close to that of Opus 4.
(It's still more expensive than Gemini 3. ) The new model also demonstrates significant improvements over its predecessor Sonnet 4. 6, released in February , on agentic performance like reasoning, tool use, software coding, and knowledge work, according to Anthropic.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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