Why Anthropic Just Made Its Smartest AI Nearly Free

Anthropic just did something companies almost never do — they took their newest, best model and priced it below the one it replaced.

Claude Sonnet 5 became the default model for every Free and Pro Claude user on July 1. It's not a quiet tune-up. Early testers are describing multi-step agent tasks that used to stall halfway now running start to finish without babysitting — and it performs close to Anthropic's premium Opus tier on a lot of real work.

Here's the part worth five minutes of your attention: why would a company discount its own flagship right when demand for it is exploding?

The short version — businesses got burned hard in the first half of the year by AI bills that spiraled out of control, and Anthropic just made the "safe default" choice a lot easier to justify. There's also a real, if narrower, price cut buried in here for anyone paying by the API token, plus one tokenizer detail worth knowing before you assume your costs moved in lockstep with the sticker price.

We break down what actually changed, who actually saves money (it's not everyone, and that distinction matters), and the one prompt that'll tell you which Claude tier you should actually be using.

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