Claude Sonnet 5: Anthropic's New Mid-Range AI Agent

Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5, a new mid-range AI model designed for more independent tasks at a lower cost. This model is now the default for free and Pro package users and is available to all customers. What's interesting is that Sonnet 5 can make plans and use tools autonomously, a capability previously limited to larger, more expensive models. This is called agentic AI. Sonnet 5's pricing starts at US$2 per million input tokens and US$10 per million output tokens, making it cheaper than some competitors like OpenAI's Opus 4.8. Anthropic claims Sonnet 5 performs close to Opus 4.8 but at a lower price. It scored 63.2 percent on the agentic programming benchmark and even slightly outperforms Opus 4.8 on knowledge-based work. This model is also claimed to be more secure, better at rejecting malicious requests, and less prone to hallucination than its predecessor. The bottom line is that the AI competition is increasingly focused on cost and efficiency.