Claude Sonnet 5 becomes the default model in Claude Code

In brief: Anthropic has made Claude Sonnet 5 the default model in Claude Code, its command-line coding tool. The model has a native one-million-token context window. Anthropic is offering promotional pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through 31 August. The model was released at the end of June.

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.

Read more: Malicious Claude Code extension on Cursor exposed up to 5,000 developers · xAI ships Grok 4.5, an ‘Opus-class’ model tuned for coding and agents · Anthropic redeploys Claude Fable 5 worldwide after export controls lifted

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

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