Anthropic unveils Claude Sonnet 5 with better performance, lower costs

3 min readUpdated: Jul 1, 2026 02:47 PM IST

Claude Sonnet 5 delivers improved reasoning, coding and tool-use capabilities while costing less than Anthropic's flagship models. (Image: Anthropic)

Anthropic has unveiled Claude Sonnet 5, a new mid-sized AI model designed to deliver advanced autonomous capabilities at a significantly lower cost than its flagship systems. The launch reflects a growing trend in the artificial intelligence industry, where major companies are moving from chatbots to AI systems capable of independently planning, reasoning, and completing complex tasks.

According to Anthropic, Claude Sonnet 5 can create multi-step plans, use tools such as web browsers and computer terminals, and complete tasks with minimal human supervision. The company says the model now performs at a level that only much larger and more expensive AI systems could achieve just months ago.

The release comes amid similar announcements from rivals. OpenAI recently introduced GPT-5.6 Sol with enhanced multi-agent capabilities, while Google positioned its Gemini 3.5 Flash model as an AI assistant capable of executing real-world tasks rather than simply responding to prompts. As a result, autonomous or ‘agentic’ AI is quickly becoming the new industry standard.

Anthropic’s USP for Claude Sonnet 5 is its balance between performance and cost. The company says the model delivers results close to those of its premium Claude Opus 4.8 model, while being considerably cheaper to operate.

Pricing starts at $2 (Rs 190 approximately) per million input tokens and $10 (Rs 948 approximately) per million output tokens until August 31. After that, the cost will increase to $3 (Rs 285 approximately) per million input tokens and $15 (Rs 1,423 approximately) per million output tokens.

Even after the price revision, Anthropic says Sonnet 5 remains more affordable than OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, although it is still priced above Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash.

Claude Sonnet 5 is also replacing earlier versions as the default model for both free and paid Claude users, making its upgraded capabilities immediately available across Anthropic’s platform.

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Performance improvements extend beyond pricing. Anthropic says the model performs better than its predecessor, Claude Sonnet 4.6, in reasoning, software development, tool use, and knowledge-intensive tasks. On agentic coding benchmarks, Sonnet 5 scored 63.2 per cent, compared with 58.1 per cent for Sonnet 4.6, while approaching the 69.2 per cent achieved by the larger Opus 4.8.

The company also claims Sonnet 5 is better at completing long-running tasks that earlier models often abandoned midway. It can review its own work without explicit instructions, making it more reliable for business automation and software workflows.

Early testers have reported noticeable improvements. Automation platform Zapier said the model successfully completed multi-step business workflows, such as updating Salesforce account data and sending enterprise announcements—tasks that previously stalled before completion.