Claude Sonnet 5: Agentic Coding, Pricing & Performance

Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5, which they describe as their most "agentic" Sonnet model yet. This new model can plan, use browsers and terminals, and operate autonomously on long tasks. Sonnet 5 is now the default model for Free and Pro plans and is available to Max, Team, and Enterprise users. It's also live in Claude Code and on the Claude Platform. Sonnet 5 surpasses Sonnet 4.6 on all published benchmarks. It scores 63.2% on SWE-bench Pro, 81.2% on OSWorld-Verified, and 57.4% on HLE. This significantly narrows the gap to Opus 4.8. The new model also offers introductory pricing through August 31st, making it cheaper to run than Opus 4.8. However, at higher effort levels, it can sometimes cost more than Opus 4.8 for similar quality. Sonnet 5 is considered safer than 4.6 but has deliberately low cyber capability. The bottom line is that Sonnet 5 offers improved performance and value, especially for developers working on low to medium effort tasks.