On August 10, 2026, Anthropic made Claude Sonnet 5's launch price the standard price. It stays $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. The $3 and $15 rates that were set for September 1 will not take effect.
What Anthropic actually changed
Sonnet 5 shipped on June 30 as the default model on Free and Pro, and as an option on Max, Team, and Enterprise. The API name is claude-sonnet-5. The $2 / $10 rate was sold as introductory pricing through August 31. That sale is now the list price.
The official price table still lists Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3 / $15. Batch processing on Sonnet 5 is $1 / $5. Prompt cache writes are $2.50 for five minutes and $4 for one hour. Cache hits are $0.20. Those are Anthropic's published USD rates, not a Canadian shop's invoice.
The sticker cut is not the whole bill
Anthropic says Sonnet 5 uses a newer tokenizer. The June 30 release notes put the increase at about 30 percent more tokens for the same text. The launch post footnote gives a wider range: roughly 1.0 to 1.35 times, depending on the content. The exact count depends on the file.
That means a team that compared $2 / $10 with the old $3 / $15 on Sonnet 4.6 cannot treat the job as one-third cheaper. Measure tokens on a real quote draft, a tender pack, or a support thread. Then price the finished task, not the brochure rate.
Two other line items sit on the same pricing page. US-only inference on Claude 4.6 and later carries a 1.1 times multiplier. Priority Tier is not available on Sonnet 5. If a contractor promised you that add-on, ask again.
What a local operator should do
If you already budgeted a September Claude hike, you can keep the $2 / $10 plan and spend the slack on review time. If you run Claude Code or Cowork on client files, keep those jobs off a public chat window. A cheaper model does not change who owns the quote.
Do not rip out Gemini, Grok, or Codex because Anthropic held a price. Pick one internal task, keep a human check, and compare error rate and token count for two weeks. Record the prompt, the output, and the human fix.