Anthropic Cancels 50% Price Hike Plan! Permanently Locks in Low Price for Sonnet 5, Stabilizing AI Agent Costs

Anthropic has canceled the planned price increase for Claude Sonnet 5, which was originally scheduled for late August.

On Monday, Anthropic announced that the initial pricing for Claude Sonnet 5 will be permanently retained. When the model was released in June this year, the price for input tokens was $2 per million and for output tokens was $10 per million. This pricing was originally intended to last only until August 31, after which it was set to rise to $3 and $15, respectively.

This adjustment is particularly important for agentic AI developers. Anthropic stated that Sonnet 5 is its “most agentic Sonnet model,” capable of autonomously planning and invoking tools such as browsers and terminals to complete complex tasks.

Under the previous plan, the API cost for Claude Sonnet 5 would have increased by 50%. Permanently maintaining the current price means that enterprises that have already built workflows based on Sonnet 5 can enjoy more stable cost expectations.

According to a previous article by Wall Street News, Anthropic is about to launch Claude Sonnet 5.5, internally codenamed “Fennec.” Rumors suggest its context window will double to 2 million tokens, with faster inference speeds and stronger agentic capabilities. Its overall performance is approaching that of the flagship Fable 5, yet it will maintain Sonnet-tier pricing, potentially making it the most cost-effective competitor in the mid-to-high-end AI market.

As IPO Approaches, Cost Stability Becomes a Competitive Edge

Anthropic secretly submitted its IPO registration documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. The company has not yet announced a specific listing date, but the market expects it may go public later this year.

For enterprise customers, the long-term stability of model API prices is becoming a key consideration in deploying agentic AI. Especially in scenarios such as code development, research, and browser automation, agentic tasks often require multiple rounds of model calls, causing token costs to accumulate rapidly with task complexity.

Therefore, Anthropic’s decision to cancel the price hike not only reduces the actual usage cost of Sonnet 5 but also provides developers with a clearer long-term cost baseline.

As competition among AI models shifts from pure performance comparisons to a comprehensive contest involving model capabilities, token prices, and enterprise unit economics, the permanent pricing of Sonnet 5 could become a significant strategy for Anthropic to capture enterprise agentic AI workloads.

Anthropic’s Commercialization Enters an Acceleration Phase

This pricing adjustment comes as Anthropic’s commercialization expands rapidly.

In May, Anthropic announced the completion of a $65 billion Series H funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $965 billion, and disclosed that its annualized revenue had exceeded $47 billion as of early May. The company previously stated that more than 1,000 enterprise customers spend over $1 million annually on Anthropic’s services.

Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to aggressively expand its computing power.

In May this year, the company was reported to have reached a nearly $45 billion agreement with SpaceX for computing resources. In June, Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone established the AI XPV Platform, with an initial transaction size of $35 billion, to support computing infrastructure construction for AI companies including Anthropic.

Amid rapid revenue growth and continued expansion in computing investments, Anthropic’s choice to lock in the Sonnet 5 price may aim to drive usage scale growth through lower API prices, thereby maintaining its leading position.

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