# Claude Sonnet 5 Released as Default Model for Free and Pro Users

> Anthropic has made Claude Sonnet 5 the default model for both free and Pro users, a sign of how quickly the mid-tier is catching up to the flagship. On an agentic coding benchmark it scores 63.2 percent, not far behind Opus 4.8 at 69.2 percent, and Anthropic says it actually surpasses Opus on general knowledge work. It ships with a one million token context window and up to 128 thousand tokens of output. The pricing is the part most users will feel. Through August 31 the model runs at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 10 dollars per million output, rising afterward to 3 and 15 dollars. That puts frontier-adjacent capability within reach of hobbyists and small teams who could not justify Opus rates. Anthropic is also billing this as the first Sonnet with real-time cybersecurity safeguards baked in, a nod to the growing worry that cheaper, widely available agents can be pointed at things they should not touch. The broader story is commoditization: the gap between default and premium keeps shrinking, and the default keeps getting better.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Anthropic · Published Saturday, August 1, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Anthropic has made Claude Sonnet 5 the default model for both free and Pro users, a sign of how quickly the mid-tier is catching up to the flagship. On an agentic coding benchmark it scores 63.2 percent, not far behind Opus 4.8 at 69.2 percent, and Anthropic says it actually surpasses Opus on general knowledge work. It ships with a one million token context window and up to 128 thousand tokens of output. The pricing is the part most users will feel. Through August 31 the model runs at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 10 dollars per million output, rising afterward to 3 and 15 dollars. That puts frontier-adjacent capability within reach of hobbyists and small teams who could not justify Opus rates. Anthropic is also billing this as the first Sonnet with real-time cybersecurity safeguards baked in, a nod to the growing worry that cheaper, widely available agents can be pointed at things they should not touch. The broader story is commoditization: the gap between default and premium keeps shrinking, and the default keeps getting better.

## Source

[Read the full story at Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5)

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