Anthropic cancels planned Claude Sonnet 5 price hike — $2/$10 is now permanent
Anthropic cancelled Sonnet 5's scheduled Sept 1 price hike — the $2/$10 rate is now permanent, breaking the $3/$15 Sonnet anchor held since Claude 3.
Claude Sonnet 5 launched July 2026 at introductory $2/$10 per 1M input/output tokens, with standard pricing of $3/$15 scheduled to take effect September 1, 2026 (matching the $3/$15 anchor held by Sonnet since Claude 3).
The $2/$10 per 1M rate for Claude Sonnet 5 is now Anthropic's permanent standard price. The previously scheduled September 1, 2026 increase to $3/$15 will not occur. Batch API pricing for Sonnet 5 is correspondingly fixed at $1/$5 (no scheduled increase to $1.50/$7.50).
Proof of change
Anthropic's own wording, on the page where we captured it.
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.
Quoted from the capture below — these words appear on the page as shown, not paraphrased.
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Anthropic’s API pricing documentation now states: “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.”
This reverses the time-boxed discount structure Anthropic published at Sonnet 5’s July 2026 launch, when the $2/$10 rate was explicitly framed as an introductory window ahead of a return to the $3/$15 per-1M anchor that Sonnet had held across four prior generations (Claude 3 Sonnet, 3.5 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet, Sonnet 4, and Sonnet 4.6). Instead of the scheduled 50% increase four days before it was due to take effect, Anthropic locked in the lower rate permanently. The change cascades through every dependent SKU: Batch API pricing for Sonnet 5 stays at $1/$5 (rather than stepping up to $1.50/$7.50), and prompt-cache write/read multipliers continue to apply against the $2/$10 base rather than $3/$15. Claude Sonnet 4.6 remains available separately at the unchanged $3/$15 rate. No other Claude.ai or API pricing changed in this update.
Four days before a scheduled 50% increase, Anthropic cancelled Claude Sonnet 5's planned September 1, 2026 step-up to $3/$15 per 1M tokens. The introductory $2/$10 rate (in effect since the July 2026 launch) is now the permanent standard price, breaking the $3/$15 Sonnet anchor that had held across four prior generations. Batch pricing stays fixed at $1/$5 (the scheduled step to $1.50/$7.50 also does not occur); no other Claude.ai or API pricing changed.