Claude Sonnet 5 Launches at $2/$10 Per Million Tokens Through August
Anthropic's new mid-tier model ships with introductory pricing well below its eventual sticker price, positioning it as the default choice for agentic workloads.
By Dillip Chowdary • Jun 30, 2026 • Source: TechCrunch
Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026, positioning it as the new default mid-tier model for both consumer and developer traffic.
The model shipped with introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens — pricing that holds through August 31, 2026, after which it reverts to Anthropic's standard $3/$15 rate for the tier.
Sonnet 5 is now the default model backing Free and Pro chat plans, and it's available to developers as claude-sonnet-5 through the standard API, positioning it squarely against cheaper agent-oriented offerings from competitors.
Anthropic is explicitly framing the discount window as a way to pull agentic-workload traffic — the kind of high-volume, tool-calling usage where token costs compound quickly — onto Sonnet 5 before the price reverts.
For teams already budgeting per-token costs into agent pipelines, the practical takeaway is the two-month runway: usage locked in before August 31 gets meaningfully cheaper per-call economics than the same workload run in September.