Claude Sonnet 5 becomes the default model in Claude Code

Anthropic has made Claude Sonnet 5 the default model in Claude Code, its command-line coding tool. The company describes Sonnet 5 as delivering frontier performance across coding, agents and professional work at scale.

The model ships with a native one-million-token context window, letting it hold far larger codebases and documents in a single session. Anthropic is running promotional pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31.

Sonnet 5 was released at the end of June as part of a broader wave of Anthropic launches that also included the Claude Science research workbench.

The larger context window and lower promotional rates target developers running long agentic coding sessions, where models repeatedly read and edit large amounts of code.

Sources: Anthropic Newsroom; Releasebot (Claude Code updates).

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