Anthropic cancels the scheduled Claude Sonnet 5 price increase

Claude Sonnet 5 launched in June at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, framed at the time as introductory pricing running through August 31, with standard pricing of $3 and $15 per million tokens scheduled to start September 1, a 50 percent increase on both sides of the ledger. Anthropic's pricing documentation now reads: "The $2/$10 per million input/output token pricing for Claude Sonnet 5, announced at launch as introductory pricing through August 31, 2026, is now the standard price. The previously scheduled increase to $3/$15 per million input/output tokens on September 1, 2026 will not occur." The dependent rates built on top of that base figure, batch processing at $1 input and $5 output per million tokens, a five-minute cache write at 1.25 times the base input price, a one-hour write at twice the base rate, stay anchored to $2/$10 rather than the higher number some teams had planned around.

Why it matters: Teams that use Sonnet 5 as the default model behind their coding agents can stop budgeting for a 50 percent cost jump this week. Current rates do not fall; Anthropic is canceling an increase that was already scheduled. The tokenizer that makes Sonnet 5 consume roughly 30 percent more tokens than Sonnet 4.6 for the same text is unchanged.