Claude Sonnet 5

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• Hacker News
• Anthropic outsmarted everyone again.

  They released Sonnet 5 with a temporary price reduction until August. Everyone was excited, but in reality, they increased the tokenizer size by 50%. As a result, the actual cost went up by 50%, they shifted everyone's attention to decrease.

  Thus, Anthropic is raising prices but not telling anyone about it. Nobody is really aware of it. You go to the pricing page, the price looks the same. Yet people are actually paying 50% more.

  Very shady marketing.

  And of course they lie about 35% again. In reality with coding it is 50%.

  UPD: I run playcode.io, so it’s my job test all models, their pricing, quality in order to provide best price/quality/speedy/reliability to non-techy.

  by ianberdin
• Judging from those cost-performance graphs, Sonnet doesn't make sense to run at anything higher than a medium reasoning level, since Opus 4.8 low reasoning outclasses it for the price.

  This line as a selling point is also pretty funny:

  > Evaluations also show that it has a much lower ability to perform cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models.

  by johnfahey
• > Evaluations also show that it has a much lower ability to perform cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models.

  Why would they brag about something like this? It's like they know people want to use models to perform cybersecurity tasks yet knowingly deny them the ability.

  And Opus 4.8 is still cheaper for a higher pass rate (much less open weight models like GLM 5.2) so not sure why I'd use Sonnet except on the low effort level for I suppose trivial tasks where I want it to work only 50% of the time judging by the graph. The pricing doesn't really make any sense.

  by satvikpendem
• so it doesn't get blocked. last time they said a model was great at cyber it didnt turn out well
  by lanthissa
• One of the best queries I've done with an LLM recently was: Create a plan for improving the robustness and resilience of this code, particularly to untrusted inputs.

  Gemini wouldn't do a security audit. But it came up with a great set of mitigations and identified an extant XSS flaw in the process of improving robustness.

  There's an awful lot of good that can come from proactive, defensive use of LLMs. I realize there's also a lot of pain when the difficulty of exploit finding drops suddenly, but in the long term we may all benefit from the defensive side of this.

  by dgacmu
• Flowers for Algernon. And, sadly, expect this from now on. You saw it with OpenAI releasing Sol/Terra/Luna with a chart showing how they weren't quite as good as Mythos. It's all messaging to the USG to try to avoid/minimize arbitrary review from multiple agencies. 'Hey, it's smart, but look how stupid it is at "cyber."'
  by bluepeter
• Restricting the models isn’t about restricting offensive capabilities. They were already very well aligned to reduce that risk.

  This recent government interference is about trying to preserve US offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap, which would kneecap us cyberoffensive capability.

  It’s like making seatbelts illegal so that police chases can be more effective.

  by K0balt
• Why do you think they are bragging? Anthropic has long been the company to give us by far the most in-depth information about their models, both positive and negative. I read this as them just stating a fact about this model that users would want to know.
  by MostlyStable
• There's two classes of models now - the cybersecurity ones that none of us are getting, and the 'safe' models released for general consumption. This is letting us know which side of the divide it sits on.
  by kristianc
• They spent months hyping up Mythos and ended up with it banned. I’d assume they want to both differentiate their products and appeal to regulators here
  by zlurker
• "Lower ability to perform cybersecurity-related tasks" makes me super concerned it will leave my codebase like Swiss cheese for any American granny with access to Fable 5, when we non-American Brits, or rest-of-worlders, don't have access to it to clean our codebases.
  by secretslol
• The cost per task chart is telling me that I should _never_ use Sonnet 5 above medium effort level - Opus always performs better for a given cost. So I guess the takeaway is that if Sonnet 5 medium isn't good enough for you, switch models, not effort levels.
  by doctoboggan
• You're referring to the Agentic search, but if you look at the Agentic computer use the cost is basically halved.

  However, I am also confused about market positioning. Too expensive to perform daily tasks - open souce models are much cheaper - and not frontier model to address complex real world problems.

  Rarely used Sonnet btw.

  by lucamark
• Well, it is a Sonnet model, it is indeed better[0] than Sonnet 4.6 (smarter, faster, cheaper), but I don't see why would you use it as opposed to Opus 4.8 low or GLM-5.2...

  [0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/anthropic-claude-sonnet-4-6-med...

  by XCSme
• Worth noting that the default chart there is for "agentic search performance", not coding. I didn't see an effort comparison for coding specifically.
  by seiru
• The arguable caveat is Sonnet may run faster (although this isn't known for sure, due to more tokens being used for the same task), so you can potentially get more done in a synchronous iterative workflow

  I don't really believe this however, because so much time is spent fixing up after models, that a slower but more intelligent model is a net time saver in my experience.

  by energy123
• Yeah, I was looking at the same chart and was very surprised at where the curve is relative to opus... Feels like sonnet 5 is "what if opus had an extra-low effort level"?
  by Torkel
• There are two wrinkles to this:

  - For Claude.ai subscriptions I think Sonnet is much cheaper than Opus. This is why there was a "Sonnet only" usage bar for Max tier for the longest time.

  - For some tasks the sheer amount of raw input tokens is the most important. For example multimodal computer use tasks. You can't make them any more efficient on Opus by turning down the reasoning, so a cheaper model like Sonnet is useful for them

  by 2001zhaozhao
• While I appreciate, they publish this information, it's increasingly hard to keep track of it all. I've lost the mental model of how different models at different effort levels perform and what tasks they are good at.

  In practice, I tend to just use the default on Claude Code that works well enough. But I wonder to what degree other users really play around with these settings to optimize for their project.

  by AquinasCoder
• They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. So I'm just not going to use their services at all anymore. I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior, and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. I'll be okay without their bullshit generator.
  by jimbo808
• Seems to be another great incremental update to the workhorse, nice!

  I've been using Sonnet instead of Opus for almost all coding tasks for a while now. A little elbow grease to break down tasks and you can spend a lot less money for just about the same output quality.

  by phillipcarter
• It's a 30% price increase once the discount rate vanishes.
  by philipwhiuk
• Yeah I think people are sleeping on the smaller/faster models like Sonnet. As long as you have a detailed plan or small, well scoped individual tasks Sonnet can implement just fine. Opus will still do better at more open ended tasks or completely "vibe coding." Or spec/plan with Opus, and have Sonnet implement.
  by thewebguyd
• Crazy. I just changed the default for our entire org to Opus because people were continually unimpressed with Sonnet's abilities. It's fascinating to think how varied people's experiences are when interacting with LLMs and how much the outcomes depend on how people approach interacting with the models.
  by SeanAnderson
• Important to note: "Sonnet 5 is an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, but it uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text to improve performance (this is similar to the tokenizer change we introduced with Claude Opus 4.7). The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens: roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. The introductory pricing is set so that the transition to Sonnet 5 is roughly cost-neutral."
  by m3h
• "We can raise prices in two ways: (1) raise the price per token and (2) increase the number of tokens we generate on your behalf. We promise not to do (2) maliciously. Promise."
  by mattas
• So the post-introductory price is set such that Sonnet 5 will cost 100%-135% as much?
  by ComplexSystems
• Wonder if the whole cyber paranoia leads to their models ultimately generating less secure code. After all, if it has the ability to generate safe code, it would imply that it knows something about cybersecurity, which could surely be used to hack all the banks in the world.
  by Sol-
• > Wonder if the whole cyber paranoia leads to their models ultimately generating less secure code.

  This may be the goal.

  by deaux
• I think the cool kids call this "staying away from the vector space of highly skilled security engineers".
  by Traubenfuchs