Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 brings near-flagship performance to a mid-tier price

The real story in AI right now is not the top model getting smarter, it is the cheap model getting good enough to run agents all day without a scary bill. By pushing near-flagship quality down to a mid-tier price, Anthropic is betting the market cares more about cost per task than bragging rights. If that bet is right, the winners get decided in the boring middle of the lineup, not at the expensive top.