The 50% rise is off: Anthropic makes Claude Sonnet 5's $2/$10 the standard price

Sixteen days before the deadline, Anthropic has cancelled the price increase it scheduled for Claude Sonnet 5. The company's pricing documentation now states plainly that the $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, announced at launch as an introductory rate running through 31 August 2026, is the standard price, and that the increase to $3 and $15 planned for 1 September will not occur. This reverses the situation we reported on 6 August, when the same documentation carried the expiry date as a footnote. What was a discount with a countdown is now simply the price. Sonnet 5 keeps its position in Anthropic's ladder — Fable 5 at $10 / $50, Opus 5 at $5 / $25, Sonnet 5 at $2 / $10, Haiku 4.5 at $1 / $5 — but it is no longer the only current Claude model sold below its own list. One qualification from that earlier piece still holds, because it was never about the rate card. Sonnet 5 uses the tokenizer introduced with Opus 4.7, and Anthropic's own note says the same text yields roughly 30% more tokens on it than on the previous generation; Sonnet 4.6 and earlier use the older tokenizer. On the headline, Sonnet 5 is a third cheaper than Sonnet 4.6's $3 / $15. Measured per page of text rather than per token, the saving is closer to a tenth. The same arithmetic applies to the context window: the company puts one million tokens on Sonnet 5 at about 555,000 words, against roughly 750,000 words for the same million on Sonnet 4.6. The timing invites one comparison. Two days ago Google presented Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75 and $3.75 per million tokens, described as half the price of its predecessor — a rate its own price list dates to 31 December 2026, after which it doubles. Within one week, then, two vendors have taken opposite decisions about the same instrument: one has removed the expiry date from a discount, the other has left it in place. For anyone budgeting a year ahead, that difference matters more than the headline figures. Our Claude Sonnet 5 profile has been updated with the standard price and the cancelled increase.