Anthropic cancels the Claude Sonnet 5 price rise that was due on 1 September

The cancelled rise matters more than a cancelled rise usually would, because of where Sonnet 5 sits. It is the middle of Anthropic’s range: cheaper than the flagship, dearer than the small models, and the one most people reach for when they want good work at a price they can defend. Moving it from $2 to $3 would have put it within touching distance of the tier above and changed which model a reasonable person picks.

There is a second reading here, about how pricing pages behave. A scheduled rise is published as a promise and withdrawn as an edit. The page that carried the schedule now carries the standard price, and no version of it says a rise was ever planned. Anyone who read the page in August and costed a year of work on the higher figure has no way to discover from the page itself that the figure is wrong. That gap is the reason this site keeps dated rows.