Claude Sonnet 5
The everyday workhorse — and now the default across Claude products.
- Maker
- Anthropic
- Context
- 1M tokens
- Pricing
- $2 / 1M tokens / $10 / 1M tokens
The $2 / $10 launch price was introductory through 31 Aug 2026. Anthropic made it permanent: the scheduled rise to $3 / $15 will not happen. The 1M window is standard, not a beta flag.
Best for
- Day-to-day drafting, rewriting, and summarising
- Fast iteration loops where you refine across several turns
- 80% of product workflows that don't need flagship-grade reasoning
Prompting quirks
Same structure tricks as Opus, lower cost
XML tags and explicit roles work identically. Reach for Sonnet first and only escalate when the answer genuinely disappoints.
Give it an output format up front
Specify "answer as a 5-row table" or "max 120 words" in the prompt. Sonnet honours format constraints tightly, which keeps outputs short and cheap.
A 1M window is not an invitation to fill it
You can paste the whole corpus now, but you still pay per token on the way in. Paste what the question actually needs; the window is a safety margin, not a workflow.
Copy-paste example
Tuned for Claude Sonnet 5. Swap in your own content where marked.
<notes>
{paste raw interview notes}
</notes>
Pull out the top 5 user pains. For each: a one-line quote that evidences
it, and how often it appeared. Table only, no preamble.Facts verified against the official Anthropic docs on 19 August 2026.